Category: Programming

Many programs these days are written using multiple threads, multiple processes, and multiple languages. Our current debugging solutions don’t cope particularly well with any of those. gdb supports multiple threads. However, the interface is hard to work with. You have to select which thread you want to look at. Threads are referred to using numbers…

A lot of smart people have thought much harder than I have about version control systems, and I am by no means an expert on them. That said, this is what I want from a VCS, beyond the obvious: I want to be able to name a patch. I want to be able to easily…

Sun introduced a symbol versioning scheme to use for the linker. Their implementation is relatively simple: symbol versions are defined in a version script provided when a shared library was created. The dynamic linker can verify that all required versions are present. This is useful for ensuring that an application can run with a specific…

The two best ways of learning how to program are writing code and reading (good) code. I read a lot of code in my younger days, and I think it helped me. Programming courses give students plenty of practice in writing code. I wonder how many give students an opportunity to read good code. There…

I’m at the GCC Summit in Ottawa, and short on time. I gave a double presentation today, on gold (slides) and on writing gcc in C++ (slides).