Category: Programming

Sun introduced a symbol versioning scheme to use for the linker. Their implementation is relatively simple: symbol versions are defined in a version script provided when a shared library was created. The dynamic linker can verify that all required versions are present. This is useful for ensuring that an application can run with a specific…

The two best ways of learning how to program are writing code and reading (good) code. I read a lot of code in my younger days, and I think it helped me. Programming courses give students plenty of practice in writing code. I wonder how many give students an opportunity to read good code. There…

I’m at the GCC Summit in Ottawa, and short on time. I gave a double presentation today, on gold (slides) and on writing gcc in C++ (slides).

Although it hasn’t been my habit to track other blogs closely, Ben Collins-Sussman wrote an interesting post about Programmer Insecurity. The gist of the post is that programmers need to share code early in the development process. They should not develop code in their own cave, and then unleash it on an unsuspecting world. This…

I recall a Microsoft magazine ad from the mid-1980’s, back when Microsoft was best known for the compiler. The ad was four pages long. The first page said that their new development environment had the three things every programmer wanted. I didn’t use Microsoft tools in any case, but when I looked at that page,…