Category: Programming

I recently spent some time sorting through linker version script issues, so I’m going to document what I discovered. Linker symbol versioning was invented at Sun. The Solaris linker lets you use a version script when you create a shared library. This script assigns versions to specific named symbols, and defines a version hierarchy. When…

I recently encountered a nice example of cargo cult programming. In bug 10980 Robert Wohlrab helpfully built a large number of Debian packages with the gold linker and reported errors about unknown options. These were options supported by the GNU linker but not by gold. (I’ve now added all the options to gold). Among the…

The goal of generics in a programming language is to save programmer time. Generics permit you to write code that works with multiple types only once. They also permit one programmer to write generic algorithms which you can use with your program’s types. This kind of thing is attractive to anybody who has written a…

When writing the gccgo frontend I had to figure out how to write a new gcc frontend. This is a largely undocumented procedure. Unfortunately, I did not take notes as I went along. However, here are some retrospective comments. Every gcc frontend needs a set of language hooks. This is done by including “langhooks-def.h” and…

One of the aspects of Go that some people find confusing is the two predeclared functions, new and make. Both functions are specially implemented in the compiler. They take a type as an argument and return a value. This can make it seem confusing when you should use one and when you should use the…