http://www.airs.com/blog Ian Lance Taylor Sat, 17 May 2008 01:15:38 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en When I was in grade school we were taught that monotheism was a historical advance, comparable to agriculture or other notable inventions. For example, we learned that Akenhaten was a significant figure because he was the first historical figure to advocate monotheism, although it was later repudiated by his ... http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/193 Many programs today are written at a very high level. They are run in an interpreted environment, not a compiler. Often many different components running in different interpreted environments are hooked together. HTML and XML, for example, started out as markup languages, but now they are often ... http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/192 Peer review can be a useful technique when programming. It ensures that at least one other person has read the code. It can catch dumb bugs and help ensure that the code is not unnecessarily obscure. Several popular programming methodologies use it. (Pair programming has the ... http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/191 I’ve always liked Iron Man. Tony Stark has a simple comic book story: a smart guy, who doesn’t think very much about what he’s doing, is nearly killed. The experience changes him–but not all that much. He’s a superhero because he’s addicted to action, because he feels ... http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/190 gcc, the GNU linker, and the glibc dynamic linker cooperate to implement an idea called read-only relocations, or relro. This permits the linker to designate a part of an executable or (more commonly) a shared library as being read-only after dynamic relocations have been applied. This may be used for ... http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/189 My home city, Cambridge, Massachusetts, used to have rent control. It was generally supported in the city, but it was voted out in a statewide referendum in 1994. The statewide referendum was a bit of a crock; only three cities in the state had any form of rent control (Cambridge, ... http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/188 It is time to start using C++ in gcc. gcc was originally written in C. C++ has now advanced to the point where we can reasonably take advantage of the new features that it provides. The most obvious advantage would be in data structures. gcc implements ... http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/187 The GNU linker has a -z combreloc option, which is enabled by default (it can be turned off via -z nocombreloc). I just implemented this in gold as well. This option directs the linker to sort the dynamic relocations. The sorting is done in order to optimize ... http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/186 gcc uses garbage collection internally during the course of a compilation. I wasn’t too involved with gcc at the time that garbage collection was introduced, but I certainly saw the problems that it was trying to solve. Before garbage collection, gcc allocated memory using obstacks. An obstack ... http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/185 I see that both McCain and Clinton are suggesting that the gas tax should be abolished for the summer. Obama is resisting that, though he voted in favor of a similar proposal back in 2000 as a state senator. Dropping the gas tax would be hideously irresponsible. The U.S. ... http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/184