The population of a country shifts over time. Here’s how the population distribution of the United States changed from 2000 to 2010: There’s a noticeable population bulge from Boomers (born ’46-64, age 36-54 in 2000). For more up-to-date numbers, the Census Bureau helpfully provides a projection estimating the distribution for 2020. The CDC also provides […]| eschew it all
I recently watched two videos from POPL and wanted to help make their ideas more widely known. Ten minutes of text to help you decide whether to watch eighty minutes of video, what a deal! Incorrectness Logic by Peter O’Hearn (paper, talk) The core idea: create a program logic for finding bugs rather than preventing […]| eschew it all
A while back I downloaded an iOS game called KAMI 2. It’s a fun, relaxing puzzler with many nice touches — a very well-crafted app. Playing the game looks like this: The goal is to get the screen to show just one color (any color) using a limited number of moves. Each move changes a connected region’s color. […]| eschew it all
(via the Dot Map)| eschew it all
This post is intended to give a whirlwind[0] tour of what I think are some highlights of the last decade-ish of the research literature on garbage collection. If you’re interested and want to learn more, the Garbage Collection Handbook (via Amazon) is an indispensable resource. Ravenbrook’s Memory Management Reference is also quite nice! Background There […]| eschew it all
The first browser I ever used was Netscape Navigator, and that allegiance continued over the years with the Mozilla Suite, then Camino, then Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox. Thinking about Camino makes me both happy and sad. It was far ahead of its time in terms of user experience, but it stagnated due to lack of attention, as its developers […]| eschew it all
Going through some old files emails, it’s been interesting to dip into the not-so-distant past. Unfortunately sent messages were very sparsely archived, so I have only the incoming half of most email conversations. And sadly, all my email before 2002 appears to have been lost or corrupted. Oh well. A few bits and pieces: Xbox […]| eschew it all
LLVM’s documentation suggests that its getelementptr instruction is one of the most commonly misunderstood aspects of the system. In my experience, GEP is only number two on the list; number one is LLVM’s GC support: what it provides, what it doesn’t provide, and how to use it effectively. The first two are the easy ones: […]| eschew it all
Mercurial Queues are a powerful tool for organizing changes into logically coherent commits. My current workflow often goes something like this: Make some changes implementing feature A (as a patch). Generate a series of patches moving on to feature B. Realize, after working on feature B, that feature A needs a small tweak, or a […]| eschew it all
Looks like someone at Apple has a bit of a sense of humor: sosumi for the legal section, eh? Apparently they did the same thing for the 10 billion download promotion, too.| eschew it all
Going through the files on an old family computer, I discovered a long-lost email exchange with Douglas Adams: Subject: Re: Agrajag Date: Fri, 11 Jun 1999 17:52:48 -0700 From: "Douglas Adams" <askdna@TDV.COM> To: Martin Karel <karel@BELLATLANTIC.NET> Irene – I’m pretty bad at planning what’s going to happen next week. Alex is exactly right. Best, ———————————————————– […]| eschew it all
It looks like Firefox is moving to a compatible-by-default model for extensions. I find this interesting, since I proposed this back in 2004 to no avail. To be clear, I don’t mean to say that compatible-by-default would have been the right choice in 2004… Predictions about the past are almost hard as predictions about the […]| eschew it all
We were initially our own worst enemies in this undertaking, victims of a way of thinking to which we engineers are dangerously susceptible. This way of thinking is characterized by the conceit that all things may be planned in advance and then directly implemented according to the plan’s detailed specification. For persons schooled in the […]| eschew it all
“A proposed long term solution: a new functional language that features implicit parallelism, dependent typing, and an effects type system” “We are also working with an ISV on a compiler for…| eschew it all
John Regehr recently solicited advice for what an introductory compilers class should cover in 2020. To save you the trouble of reading through the whole thread, I’ll quote/summarize a bit be…| eschew it all
