Category: Programming

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…

I recently added support for STT_GNU_IFUNC to gold. As you can tell by the name, STT_GNU_IFUNC is a GNU specific ELF symbol type. It is defined in the range reserved for operating system specific types. A symbol with type STT_GNU_IFUNC is a function, but the symbol does not provide the address of the function as…

It’s a frequent observation that computing has oscillated between centralized and distributed. We’ve gone from centralized computing facilities (which were effectively single-user, but only the administrators could use them) to time-sharing to personal computers to server farms. Data has moved from the card deck you kept in your office to the tape deck at the…

I’ve always found it easy to deal with machines, as I expect is true of most computer programmers. The interface to a machine is not always logical, but it is normally consistent in the sense that it always behaves the same way given the same inputs, and it is normally unambiguous in the sense that…

Back in March Go picked up a dynamic exception mechanism. Previously, when code called the panic function, it simply aborted your program. Now, it walks up the stack to the top of the currently running goroutine, running all deferred functions. More interestingly, if a deferred function calls the new recover function, the panic is interrupted,…