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Comment by mattgodbolt | Hacker News Reader

It's never been called anything but either "GCC Explorer" or "Compiler Explorer", by me, anyway... The URL it's accessible for is an accident of the one I had hanging around :) (it's now available at compiler-explorer.com too, but...the name other people use has stuck so I'll never be able to reclaim my own domain...)

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I think you _could_ reclaim your own domain if you wanted. You'd want to have a banner at the top with a clear note directing people to the new domain for the compiler explorer, so that people realize immediately that you're not domain squatting. A few people might put up a stink, but I'm pretty confident that most people wouldn't mind, especially since the tool itself is so useful. The name, for those who don't know it as your last name, is fun, but it isn't the reason people use the tool. Eventually, over enough time, people would start remembering the new URL, and you could shrink or remove the banner (and/or put a note elsewhere on the page).

Honestly "godbolt" is so memorable I can find it instantly even though I rarely use it; but "compiler-explorer" sounds like some generic SEO spam site that I'd probably never click on.

Even then the internet (and even books) are full of "godbolt" links, to the tool itself, to specific code samples. Till all those became irrelevant will take quite some time.

As a data point: Search on stack overflow yields "500" hits. https://stackoverflow.com/search?q=godbolt

Links to specific examples are less of a problem as he could redirect those to compiler-explorer.com and just keep that redirect up forever. Really the only URL that would need to be "reclaimed" is https://godbolt.org/ and having a prominent link to compiler-explorer.com thee would solve that issue.

OTOH the godbolt domain is at least not actively used for a number of other TLDs getting one of those might be an easier option.

It’s such a memorable name for a tool like that. Other than losing your domain name to the topic, how do you feel about the de facto name?

To a far far lesser degree, I’ve experienced many examples of “you named it X but everyone at work calls it Y and now you have to live with that.” It used to really irk me for some reason.

It is fantastic name of an otherwise fantastic tool. The day I found it was your last name made me chuckle and liked it even more. And since I am here, thank you very much for it!

I always call it the compiler explorer but the url, as a sibling comment says, is memorable.

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