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GCC in C++
I’m very pleased to see that the GCC steering committee has agreed to permit GCC to be written in C++. At one time RMS, who is a member of the steering committee, had felt that C++ was never appropriate for systems programs like GCC. It’s good to see that he has apparently come around. There…
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GCC Project
GCC as a free software project is clearly very successful. Over more than 20 years it’s grown from nothing to become the standard compiler for several operating systems and many microprocessors. So far in 2010 the core part of the compiler alone has seen over 1000 commits by over 100 contributors. GCC continues to get…
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Iron Man 2
A few thoughts on Iron Man 2. I liked it. How odd to see a decent romantic comedy mixed into a superhero movie. Most recent romantic comedies have been terrible. Forgetting Sarah Marshall wasn’t too bad, but the last one I can remember as being solidly good was Fifty First Dates. The movies was much…
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Libertarian Civil Rights
The recent clamor over Rand Paul’s comments on the Civil Rights Act were a useful indicator of one of the problems with the libertarian approach to society. Paul was clear, in retrospect, that he supported the Civil Rights Act, but he was also clear that he was concerned about its effect on business owners. Any…
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Destructors
The Go language does not have destructors. Instead, it has two more dynamic mechanisms. A defer statement may be used to run a function on function exit or when processing a panic. A finalizer may be used to run a function when the garbage collector finds that a block of memory has nothing pointing to…