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Gold Workqueues
The gold linker is multi-threaded. I’ll sketch the implementation I chose. I wanted to avoid using lots of fine-grained mutexes, because they are both error-prone and expensive. Instead, I used a workqueue system. This requires breaking up the job into, essentially, a state machine. The whole link is defined as a series of relatively independent…
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Lock Collection
Memory management is a standard problem for programs written in C and C++. It is important to free memory when it is no longer needed, because otherwise you will run out. Unfortunately, it is complex to keep track of which memory is no longer needed. The symptoms of memory management problems are typically either running…
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Just More War
Nathan made a long series of comments on my earlier post on terrorism and Just War theory. I’m going to try to reset a bit. In that post I argued, I think correctly, that terrorism is not justified under Just War theory. But: is Just War theory applicable today? Do we believe that everybody should…
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Financial Complexity
The current news about bad management of credit risks by banks reminds me of one of my ongoing concerns about the modern financial markets. Modern finance is very large and very complex. Once upon a time financial markets were relatively straightforward: you bought stocks, bonds, future, options. These are not simple instruments, but it’s fairly…
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Blog Spam
One of the weirder aspects of writing this blog is that I get regular spam comments. The comments usually have just a few words, along of the lines of “great post, this will really help me with my essay,” along with a link to some commercial web site. At the moment I’m running about 40…