Month: November 2007
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GCC Plugins
There has been recent discussion on the gcc mailing list about plugins. There was a very interesting paper at the last gcc summit about a plugin architecture, with some interesting examples. I think plugins would be a useful addition to gcc. I think this mainly because many researchers and grad students want it. After many…
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The GNU Configure and Build System
The GNU Configure and Build System consists of autoconf, automake, and libtool. I wrote an essay about them a long time ago. Slightly more recently I was a co-author of a book about them. David MacKenzie started writing autoconf way back in 1991. I was an early beta-tester and contributed some early features. autoconf generates…
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Pakistan in the News
When the war in Iraq was under discussion, but before it started, a friend of mine said: if you’re worried about a country which has WMDs and which supports Al Qaeda, looking at Iraq doesn’t make any sense at all. Look at Pakistan. They’ve already got the bomb. They helped create the Taliban in Afghanistan.…
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Increasing Inequality
Inequality is increasing in the U.S. The real income of the bottom 20% is stagnant or even decreasing. The real income of the top 1% is skyrocketing. The effect is that the difference between the rich and the poor is getting steadily larger. Is this bad? Extreme disparities of wealth is common in third world…
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Hyperthreaded Memory
One thing I didn’t really touch on in my earlier notes on multi-threaded programming is memory. As processors become increasing hyperthreaded and multicored, access to shared memory becomes the bottleneck. The obvious recourse of processor designers will be to break the sharing: each processor will have its own memory. We already see this in the…