Category: Programming

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…

While interface values in Go are flexible, they do have confusing aspects. An interface value—e.g., a variable of an interface type— holds a value of some other type. The interface type is known as the static type, since that is the type that the compiler sees at compile type. The other type, which is only…

One of the interesting aspects of the Go language is interface objects. In Go, the word interface is overloaded to mean several different things. Every type has an interface, which is the set of methods defined for that type. This bit of code defines a struct type S with one field, and defines two methods…