Category: Programming

I was thinking recently about my visit to SCO back in 2003. Since then SCO has been through bankruptcy and their various court cases have collapsed several times, although they are still struggling on. Their argument was always very weak. I could see that at the time, although I was also scared that the court…

I’ve run a small e-mail server at airs.com for many years, providing POP and forwarding services for friends and family. In the early days of the net several people found it useful to have a fixed e-mail address which they could forward to their ISP. Later on commercial services appeared, like pobox.com, and these days…

C has always permitted comparisons between any integer type, and C++ follows its lead. Comparing signed types to signed types is straightforward: you sign extend the smaller type. Likewise, when comparing unsigned types to unsigned types, you zero extend. When comparing signed and unsigned types, the rules are less clear. The C standard specifies a…

I recently ran the gold linker under Thread Sanitizer. It’s a nice plugin for Valgrind which looks for race conditions in multi-threaded programs. To describe it briefly, it builds Happens-Before relationships based on mutex operations and warns when it notices a write and a read/write to the same memory location without a Happens-Before relationship. This…

All Go code lives in a package. Every Go source file starts with a package declaration which names the package that it lives in. A package name is a simple identifier; besides appearing in a package clause, package names are also used when referring to names imported from another package. That poses the problem of…