Too much discussion of the XOR swap trick

A blog post breaking down what XOR means (a logic rule that says “one or the other, not both”) and the infamous “swap two values without a temporary variable” trick lit up the comments more than the lesson itself. The author’s deep dive into when the trick actually helps, from local variables to pointers, is here, but the crowd immediately turned it into a retro-tech roast. One camp rolled their eyes: it’s a party trick from the 90s that modern compilers already beat. The other camp defended niche, real-world moments—like old-school vector instructions—where the move once made sense.

The drama? Pure internet. gobdovan went full cosplay: the “works on Windows XP” line had readers cackling, basically saying the trick is only “cool” when it’s flirting with code that can misbehave. praptak played the villain whisperer, warning it can blow up if you accidentally swap the same thing with itself—a perfect trap for sneaky coding contests. Meanwhile, ranger_danger took the meme route, dreaming of a “Fourier transform made of XORs,” and stinkbeetle resurfaced the cursed “XOR linked list,” the programming equivalent of a haunted artifact. mmozeiko kept it sober: yes, the trick had a time and place. Verdict from the peanut gallery? Fun history lesson, but please stop teaching this as a pro move.