Show HN: A fast, dependency-free traceroute implementation in pure C (github.com)

Is this vibe coded or is it just the readme that's AI-generated?

I take issue with the Author section. You’re the only one listed. Shouldn’t you give ChatGPT credit, or even further afield, all the developers who wrote the code and answers that ChatGPT trained on to produce this, as far as I can tell, meaningless tool?

It used to be that if someone released a tool that's 700 lines of C, they probably had an actual need and a problem they solved by writing that code because debugging even that amount of C tends to be non-trivial.

Today all bets are off. Does the tool do anything anybody needed? Does it work? Who knows. It might just be 700 lines of convincing-looking C churned out by a model.

Honest question: why would this code clamp the reported round-trip time? By default, min = 0.05 ms and max = 800 ms [1].

           if (rtt < config.min_rtt)
                rtt = config.min_rtt;
            else if (rtt > config.max_rtt)
                rtt = config.max_rtt;

Wouldn't this hide bugs in the code or network anomalies? Replies from localhost seem to typically arrive in less than 50 µs.

Comments in an earlier version [2] make no sense to me:

            /* Use standard timersub for more accurate results */
                    if (rtt < 0)
                        rtt = 0;

                    /* Cap at reasonable maximum to handle outliers */
                    if (rtt > 1000)
                        rtt = 1000;

[1] https://github.com/davidesantangelo/fastrace/blob/5b843a197b...

[2] https://github.com/davidesantangelo/fastrace/commit/79d92744...

  if (rtt < 0.0)
  {
      fprintf(stderr, "Warning: Negative RTT detected (%.3f ms) - clock issue?\n", rtt);
      rtt = 0.0;
  }

Even if it's simple or AI-made, projects like this still help people learn and explore, every start matters.

I just built and ran it.

Unlike traceroute and mtr, this utility must be run as root.

fastrace 1.1.1.1

fastrace 0.2.1

Tracing route to 1.1.1.1 (1.1.1.1)

Maximum hops: 30, Probes per hop: 3, Protocol: UDP

TTL │ IP Address (RTT ms) Hostname

────┼───────────────────────────────────────────

Error creating ICMP socket. Are you running as root?: Operation not permitted