Sunday, March 17, 2024

Tribblix - a new Solaris distribution

Nice CD download with plugins to give you the entire environment you need. Well as much as anyone needs Solaris.

Monday, February 5, 2024

CPAN Testers 400k mark

Just hit 400k submitted test results on the CPAN Testers leaderboard, exciting times.

Friday, January 26, 2024

The good, the bad, and the ugly in systemd

An improvement for service management, but also an octopus taking over too much stuff, and not very well.

Saturday, January 20, 2024

New Features in Perl

I'm pretty late but I've been following along with the Perl advent calendar again last year. Brian D Foy put together a nice article on some new features that have been added to Perl recently you may have missed, and there were some other excellent articles.

Monday, September 11, 2023

C and C++ compilers and undefined behavior

The first article goes into how it's increasingly difficult to avoid triggering undefined behavior unless you're very careful, and how compilers are emitting "optimzed" code that has little to do with the original because it's undefined.

Lumping both non-portable and buggy code into the same category was a mistake. As time has gone on, the way compilers treat undefined behavior has led to more and more unexpectedly broken programs, to the point where it is becoming difficult to tell whether any program will compile to the meaning in the original source. This post looks at a few examples and then tries to make some general observations. In particular, today’s C and C++ prioritize performance to the clear detriment of correctness.


The second article mkaes a lot of the same points, but perhaps in more depth, going through some real world examples of serious bugs that came out of small programming errors.

Saturday, August 12, 2023

Galois Fields and 512-byte C Compilers

If you ever wanted to read the blog of a programmer into both abstract algebra and designing his own MIDI hardware, you're in luck. This is some top notch stuff.

Saturday, July 22, 2023

.Net entry points

A deep dive into the true entry point of a .Net program. A lot of this I knew from reading too much CLR via C# (another great book btw) but I learned a few neat tricks, which hopefully I will never need to use outside of a toy context.