• GCC Summit

    I gave two talks on Go at the GCC Summit last week. The first was about the gccgo frontend: the IR and the gcc interface; for that one I wrote a paper, which is mostly just a miscellany. The second was a Go tutorial, focusing on the more unusual aspects of the language. The one…

  • Halloween decline

    Every year we have fewer trick or treaters come by on Halloween. This year we only had nine people, three of whom were teenagers who knocked on every door on the street at 9:30. This year I think I finally figured out what is happening. There are some streets in the city which put on…

  • const

    It took me a long time to understand that the const qualifier in C is overloaded. There was no const when I first learned C. It was introduced in the C90 standard. It was copied from C++, although the meaning of const is subtly different in the two languages. The first meaning of const in…

  • Water

    Today is Blog Action Day and the topic for the year is water. Access to fresh water is an increasing problem around the world as the combination of increasing population and climate change leave more people without it. Many people get their fresh water from glacial runoff or from aquifers, and the one is melting…

  • Proposition 23

    Last summer’s bizarre California ballot initiative was proposition 16, a PG&E funded measure which was fortunately voted down. This season’s appears to be proposition 23. Proposition 23 is admittedly much less crazy than proposition 16: it calls for the California Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006 to be suspended until California’s unemployment rate drops to…