triangulate VS nt5src

I can give you an example of an entire (well, I still consider it alpha) library I wrote several months ago, using Copilot: https://github.com/osuushi/triangulate

This is an implementation of a 1991 paper on polygon triangulation into Go. So the deepest thinking about how to solve the problem was obviously already done for me, but there were a number of edge cases that I had to invent my own solutions to, and the translation itself involved keeping a lot of context in my head.

I can’t tell you in precise detail what Copilot did, and what I wrote by hand. I wasn’t taking notes or recording my screen. But there’s a reason you don’t see a lot of blocks in there where I forgot to comment anything, because my entire process for this was “type what I want to do in English, and see if Copilot will generate the next snippet, or something close”. I didn’t do this out of bloodyminded dedication to the AI cause, but because it continued to be an extremely effective way to get the code written quickly.

I can give a few specifics:

- My linear algebra is rusty, and Copilot was extremely helpful here. I would often just type the basic thing I was trying to do in pretty vague linear algebra terms, and it would generate the formula.

I think he's misremembering about the format part because the UI does have some arbitrary cluster sizes for NTFS: https://github.com/lianthony/NT4.0/blob/b4a8d373d8a082db6758...

That code still seemed to be around in (some versions of) XP: https://github.com/tongzx/nt5src/blob/daad8a087a4e75422ec96b...

As for the ZIP support, I can't find the source code for ZIP folders specifically. There's this excerpt from another company (Schlumberger Technology Corp.): https://github.com/tongzx/nt5src/blob/daad8a087a4e75422ec96b... which was added in 1996 if the comments are to be believed.

Go likes to ignore edge cases ("all file names are UTF-8 and if they aren't then we'll just pretend they are") to make it easier to write code, so I'm not very surprised that it got caught in a POSIX related crash here.

It's hard to tell if Microsoft altered the source code since, but the leaked XP source code (https://github.com/tongzx/nt5src/blob/master/Source/XPSP1/NT...) doesn't seem to do any getenv() calls for DNS lookups. The specific bug that started all this nonsense only triggers on (specific) Unix implementations. Unfortunately, Go opts to call the POSIX methods rather than GetEnvironmentVariable/SetEnvironmentVariable on Windows, so I suppose it's still possible that somewhere in the chain this bug gets triggered by Go code.

You can view the IE source code but it isn't open source, so you cannot do much with it.