Buffered output typically comes in two flavors: fully buffered and line buffered. If output goes to a terminal then the implementation automatically selects line buffering, flushing its buffer when a line is completed so that it reaches the user immediately. Otherwise it fully buffers, holding output until the buffer…
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Regardless of your opinions of the Go programming language , the primary implementation of Go, gc, is an incredible piece of software engineering. Everyone ought to be blown away by it! Yet not only is it undervalued in general, even the Go community itself doesn’t fully appreciate it. It’s not perfect, but it has…
In my first decade writing Makefiles, I developed the bad habit of liberally using GNU Make’s extensions. I didn’t know the line between GNU Make and the portable features guaranteed by POSIX. Usually it didn’t matter much, but it would become an annoyance when building on non-Linux systems, such as on the various…
The major compilers have an enormous number of knobs . Most are highly specialized, but others are generally useful even if uncommon. For warnings, the venerable -Wall -Wextra is a good start, but circumstances improve by tweaking this warning set. This article covers high-hitting development-time options in GCC…
Note: The way I manage my email wouldn’t really work for most people, so don’t read this as a recommendation. This is just a discussion of how I prefer to use email.
Suppose you’re writing a non-GUI C application intended to run on a number of operating systems: Linux, the various BSDs, macOS, classical unix , and perhaps even something as exotic as Windows. It might sound like a rather complicated problem. These operating systems have slightly different interfaces (or very…
Over the past couple months I’ve discovered a couple of handy tricks for working with GDB breakpoints. I figured these out on my own, and I’ve not seen either discussed elsewhere, so I really ought to share them.
I’ve been fascinated with local LLMs for a couple of years now. The better open weight models, including some that inference on regular, higher-end consumer hardware at tolerable speeds, are now reliable enough to handle simpler programming tasks. This requires a coding harness, but so far this year I’ve been…
The Quite OK Image (QOI) format was announced late last year and finalized into a specification a month later. Initially dismissive, a revisit has shifted my opinion to impressed. The format hits a sweet spot in the trade-off space between complexity, speed, and compression ratio. Also considering its alpha channel…
Did you know that Emacs comes with a calculator ? Woop-dee-doo! Call the presses! Wow, a whole calculator! Sounds a bit lame, right?
Over the past month I’ve been exploring the rapidly evolving world of Large Language Models (LLM). It’s now accessible enough to run a LLM on a Raspberry Pi smarter than the original ChatGPT (November 2022). A modest desktop or laptop supports even smarter AI. It’s also private, offline, unlimited, and…
A hard reality of C and C++ software development on Windows is that there has never been a good, native C or C++ standard library implementation for the platform. A standard library should abstract over the underlying host facilities in order to ease portable software development. On Windows, C and C++ is so poorly…
This article was discussed on Hacker News and critiqued on Wandering Thoughts ( 2 , 3 ).
As a computer engineer, my job is to use computers to solve important problems. Ideally my solutions will be efficient, and typically that means making the best use of the resources at hand. Quite often these resources are machines running Windows and, despite my misgivings about the platform, there is much to be…
Gap buffers are a common data structure for representing a text buffer in a text editor. Emacs famously uses gap buffers — long-standing proof that gap buffers are a perfectly sufficient way to represent a text buffer.
My favorite music player is Audacious . It follows the Winamp Classic tradition of not trying to manage my music library. Instead it waits patiently for me to throw files and directories at it. These selections will be informally grouped into transient, disposable playlists of whatever I fancy that day.