Month: November 2010

  • Complexity

    I’ve noticed that I have a bias toward complexity. I tend to try to look at problems from all the angles I can think of. Most problems are complex from at least some points of view; otherwise, they would not be problems at all. Looking at problems from all angles encourages a focus on their…

  • Versioning

    One of the very nice features of Go is the package system. This permits compilation to be much faster than C++. In C++, if library A depends on library B depends on library C, that generally means that header files in A include header files in B and header files in B include header files…

  • QE2

    In private e-mail I got a pointer to one of the real goals of the Fed’s quantitative easing, one that we’re also seeing in other countries reactions to the Fed’s plans: to weaken the dollar in order to improve the U.S. trade deficit. This is a more plausible goal than the stated ones. By making…

  • Quantitative Easing

    The Federal Reserve Bank is about to undertake another round of quantitative easing, by purchasing up to $600 billion worth of U.S. Treasury bonds. The Fed gets to make up their own money—they don’t have to get that $600 billion from anybody else—so this is a way of expanding the overall money supply. The intent…

  • 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…