Random Musings

Here is a list of most recent posts:

• 28 April - Gorging

  When I tried to search for the demand version of dumping, I found a lot of articles about regular dumping. A few of those had good definitions, so here’s one:

• 14 April - Don’t Lie To Your Build System

  Yesterday, in Make Concepts, I talked about what Make does. Today, I’m going to talk about how Make gets abused.

• 13 April - Make Concepts

  There are many resources out there for how to use make and some of them are very good. However, they mostly focus on details of syntax and how to spell the different text manipulation functions. This document is not that. This document is about why Make is the way it is, and how to help it do its job.

• 11 February - Why I like Zig

  I’ve been writing C code professionally since about 2006, and while I look at a lot of languages (I have varying levels of familiarity with Python, Erlang, Ada, Haskell, Go, Rust, C++, OCaml, D, Javascript, Prolog, Lua, Lisp, Bash, Perl, Forth…you get the idea) I have yet to find one that I would rather use in cases where C is appropriate. Part of this inclination is that I mainly write for embedded systems where a lot of the features of higher level languages either don’t help or cost too much.

• 01 December - Memory Management With Zig

  This post is aimed at people who come from languages with automatic garbage collection and want to get a sense for how to approach memory management in a lower level language. I’ll be using Zig (and a bit of Python) to demonstrate, but the concepts apply to C and other languages where you have to care if your data is going on the stack or the heap.