Month: March 2008

  • Apocalypse Now

    We’re a bit busy with a slow motion move, so my postings may be less frequent than usual. It’s fairly common for people to say that the future world will be a terrible place for one reason or another. I wonder to what extent that has already happened. The world today is radically and completely…

  • Future Transportation

    Barring some remarkable change in the world, we are going run out of oil in my lifetime. I don’t mean that we will literally run out of oil; I mean that it will become too expensive to use for ordinary tasks such as selling it in the form of gasoline for cars. There seem to…

  • GCC Exception Frames

    When an exception is thrown in C++ and caught by one of the calling functions, the supporting libraries need to unwind the stack. With gcc this is done using a variant of DWARF debugging information. The unwind information is loaded at runtime, but is not read unless an exception is thrown. That means that the…

  • Concurrent linking

    There is still work to do on gold. But once that is done, what is the next big step? In the long term we need an incremental linker, but I’m also interested in an idea which I call concurrent linking. A concurrent linker runs at the same time as the compiler. As each object file…

  • Gold Released

    I have finally released gold, the new ELF linker I’ve been working on, to the free software world. It is now part of the GNU binutils. I sent an announcement to the binutils mailing list.