A fast, dependency-free traceroute implementation in pure C
Details
- External ID
- 45769857
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- A fast, dependency-free traceroute implementation in pure C
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- Oct. 31, 2025
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 29
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.7924528301886793
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Enrichment
- Theme
- systems tools and desktop utilities
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- fast traceroute implementation in c
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Writing a zero-dependency traceroute in pure C requires low-level systems programming, POSIX raw socket manipulations (SOCK_RAW), manually crafting IP/ICMP/UDP packet headers, and managing raw network privileges and kernel interfaces.
What it would actually take: The core implementation relies on pure C utilizing raw sockets (`socket(AF_INET, SOCK_RAW, IPPROTO_ICMP)` or UDP variants) and manual manipulation of the IP Time-To-Live (`IP_TTL`) socket options via `setsockopt`. It requires crafting and parsing raw packet byte streams (IP and ICMP echo/time-exceeded headers), computing Internet checksums, and handling low-level OS networking differences across Linux, BSD, and macOS. Deep systems networking and POSIX C expertise are strictly required.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: traceroute, mtr, valgrind, sanitizers
Concerns raised: Requires root privileges to run, Appears to be AI-generated code, High false positive rate from clang-tidy linter, Memory safety issues in C language choice, Code not written/understood by author
Feature requests: Disable overzealous clang-tidy warnings by default, Support for non-root operation like traceroute/mtr
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 1013 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #246 of 1014 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 2 days after the earliest competitor.
- CCo · hn · 2026-08-03 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.62
- Prismag · hn · 2026-06-22 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.61
- c-hd-proof · github · 2026-09-21 · 44 upvotes · similarity 0.57
- HybridCachePlus · github · 2026-09-11 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.57
- Flint · hn · 2026-08-29 · 13 upvotes · similarity 0.56
- gozarbin · github · 2026-09-16 · 9 upvotes · similarity 0.55
- codex-worker-routing · github · 2026-09-14 · 21 upvotes · similarity 0.54
- nix-compact · github · 2026-09-21 · 16 upvotes · similarity 0.54
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
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