Category: Programming

I’m very pleased to see that the GCC steering committee has agreed to permit GCC to be written in C++. At one time RMS, who is a member of the steering committee, had felt that C++ was never appropriate for systems programs like GCC. It’s good to see that he has apparently come around. There…

GCC as a free software project is clearly very successful. Over more than 20 years it’s grown from nothing to become the standard compiler for several operating systems and many microprocessors. So far in 2010 the core part of the compiler alone has seen over 1000 commits by over 100 contributors. GCC continues to get…

The Go language does not have destructors. Instead, it has two more dynamic mechanisms. A defer statement may be used to run a function on function exit or when processing a panic. A finalizer may be used to run a function when the garbage collector finds that a block of memory has nothing pointing to…

A long time ago a friend of mine pointed out a sign of trouble in any program: defining a new container model. If you are working in a language that provides containers in the standard library, then use them. If you need a container with specific behaviour, then make it look like the standard containers.…

In my youth there was a lot of support for object oriented programming. It was generally agreed that we had a software productivity problem: it was too hard to write programs. The solution was supposedly to adopt object oriented programming techniques. This was expressed in its purest form in Smalltalk, and was brought to the…