October 31, 2025
Traceroute meets flamewar
Show HN: A fast, dependency-free traceroute implementation in pure C
Fast C tool drops, crowd asks: did ChatGPT write it
TLDR: A new “Fastrace” tool promises faster, cleaner internet path tracing in pure C. The comments explode over whether AI wrote it, whether the author owes ChatGPT credit, and why it clamps speed numbers—mixing ethics, trust, and accuracy into one spicy tech debate.
A dev just dropped “Fastrace,” a lightning‑quick traceroute (it shows the path your internet traffic takes) written in plain C with no add‑ons. It boasts super‑fast timing and a slick tree view, but the real action is in the comments. The top vibe? Is this secretly AI‑coded? One user kicks off with “vibe coded?” while another demands the author credit ChatGPT for what they call a “meaningless tool.” A third piles on: 700 lines of C used to mean someone solved a real problem; now it might be model churn.
The drama doesn’t stop there. A sharp‑eyed reader spots the app clamping reported round‑trip times—basically forcing the speed numbers to stay within a preset min/max—and asks why hide weird network behavior. It’s the perfect storm: ethics, authenticity, and accuracy all colliding in one thread. Meanwhile, a few optimists cheer that even “simple or AI‑made” projects help people learn. Translation: everyone brought popcorn to this Hacker News discussion.
Between the buzzwords, the pitch is simple: faster results, no waiting, tune it live, and a clean map of where your packets go. But the crowd’s split—is it a genuine speed run, or just a good‑looking readme and an AI‑assisted code dump?
Key Points
- •Fastrace is a dependency-free traceroute utility written in pure C for network diagnostics.
- •Version 0.2.0 introduces a poll()-driven, non-blocking architecture and sub-millisecond RTT timing using monotonic clocks.
- •Dual-socket design sends UDP probes and receives ICMP responses via raw sockets, with adaptive multi-TTL probing.
- •Runtime tunables include hops, probes, concurrency (-c), timeouts, and DNS behavior (with -n to suppress lookups).
- •Performance features include adaptive probe batching (-q), expanded socket buffers, gcc -O3 compilation, and reverse DNS caching.