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2010
Apologies for the long gap between postings. It’s been a busy month. Like everybody else, a look back at some things worth noting in 2010. The Gone-Away World, by Nick Harkaway. A surrealistic quasi-comedy masquerading as an SF novel. The writing style often reminded me of Neal Stephenson. Taking apocalyptic SF one step further, most…
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Healthy Expenses
The long-term budget forecast for the U.S. federal government looks dire. This is almost entirely due to health care costs. People talk about social security going bankrupt, but that is actually easy to fix with relatively minor tweaks, such as increasing the income limit for which people pay social security taxes, and/or increasing the retirement…
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Gccgo in GCC
I committed the gccgo frontend to the mainline of gcc yesterday. Getting to this point was a long series of steps to get the various supporting patches approved. This means that gccgo will definitely be available in the gcc 4.6 release, which will happen sometime early next year. There is still quite a lot of…
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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…
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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…