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Twinkle Twinkle
I was talking to my daughter about how anybody could put anything on the Internet. She was surprised by that, and indeed it is kind of incredible. There was nothing like that when I was young: a way for any random person to speak to any other random person. Of course, as I’ve said before,…
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How Does the Gcc Organization Work?
How does the gcc compiler get written? Who works on it and why? It seems to puzzle some people. There are vast numbers of free software projects these days, far more than I try to keep track of. Among these, gcc is unusual in several respects. gcc is more than 20 years old as an…
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volatile
The volatile qualifier in C/C++ is widely misunderstood. Because it is described so vaguely in language standards, many people interpret it as a do-what-I-mean qualifier. What the standard says is that accesses to volatile objects must be evaluated strictly according to the abstract machine defined by the language standard; this means that if the C/C++…
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Moral Hazard
The U.S. government is trying to free up credit, by reducing interest rates and other steps. This is probably good for the economy. It also has the effect of reducing the risks faced by banks which made some very bad investment decisions in purchasing unsecured debt. This is a moral hazard: when things go well,…
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Lukyanenko Watch
I recently read the trilogy of books by Sergei Lukyanenko: Night Watch, Day Watch, Twilight Watch. I’m surprised they aren’t better known–my local science fiction bookstore doesn’t carry them at all. On the surface they seem rather derivative: they involve a struggle between the forces of light (the Night Watch) and the force of darkness…