Ever since Witcher games took off the franchise skyrocketed in popularity. Books, comics, TV show, games, more comics, another TV show… The story of Geralt and his marry company has been told in so many ways that it’s becoming a wee bit hard to keep track of chronology of all the events; especially across different forms of media.

In this article I’ve collected all official Witcher works ordering them in chronological order. To avoid any confusion, let me state up front that if you’re new to the franchise or haven’t read the books yet this list might not be for you. If you’re looking for the order to read the books in, I’ve prepared a separate article which describes that.

Skip right to the chronology

Without beating around the bush, the reading order for the Witcher books is as follows:

In a past life I’ve talked about a challenge to write the shortest program which prints all prime numbers less than a hundred. Back then I’ve discussed a 60-character long solution written in C. Since Rust is the future, inspired by a recent thread on Sieve of Eratosthenes I’ve decided to carry the task for Rust as well.

To avoid spoiling the solution, I’m padding this article with a bit of unrelated content. To jump straight to the code, skip the next block of paragraphs. Otherwise, here’s a joke for ya:

Here’s a puzzle: What does the following C++ code output:

#include <cstdio>
#include <string>

struct Foo {
	Foo(unsigned n = 1) {
		std::printf("Hell%s,", std::string(n, 'o').c_str());
	}
	~Foo() {
		std::printf("%s", " world");
	}
};

static constexpr double pi = 3.141592653589793238;

int main(void) {
	Foo foo();
	Foo bar(unsigned(pi));
}

English version available on The Codeless Code.

Niedawno przyjęty do świątyni mnich zbliżył się do mistrza.

― Otrzymałem zadanie dodania kilku nowych funkcji do systemu obsługi zamówień Cesarskiego Szewca, ale nie jestem w stanie zrozumieć, jak on działa. Logika jest rozproszona pomiędzy wiele aplikacji zaimplementowanych przy użyciu najróżniejszych technologii. Zamiast stworzyć wspólne biblioteki, autorzy najzwyklej skopiowali fragmenty kodu pomiędzy różnymi miejscami, często wprowadzając subtelne rozbieżności. Zadania pracujące w tle wyszukują i modyfikują rekordy w bazie danych bez żadnego udokumentowanego powodu. Sama baza danych wydaje się spiskować przeciwko mnie: prosta modyfikacja jednej tabeli może wyzwolić kaskadę zmian w wielu innych.

Don’t you hate when you need to do something you had done before, but cannot remember how exactly? I’ve been in that situation several times and sometimes looking up for a correct method turned out considerably harder than it should. To alleviate the need for future Googling, here’s a bag of notes I can reference easily:

• Getting past Chrome certificate error
• ‘Compressing’ git repository
• Changing commits author
• How to start a letter in English
• Summing numbers in a column in Emacs

Looking for Python stuff? Those are now in separate post:

• Converting date to timestamp
• Re-rising Python exception preserving back-trace
• Flattening a list in Python

Anyone working in a major company must have been hit by some ‘funny’ mail from a coworker that helps everyone gets through the day. No different at my office — at one point all engineers have been challenged to write the shortest code in C that prints all prime numbers (and only prime numbers) less than a hundred each on separate line.

This is an interesting brain-teaser so posting it here so others may choose to think about it while their code’s compiling.

Of course, a ‘C program’ needs not to be taken too seriously — depending on not too far fetched undefined behaviours of given implementation is all right (but please do not use system or exec family of calls; not that I can see how that would help).

By the way, if you’re interested in how this challenge looks solved in Rust, I’ve described that as well.