Weekly breakdown – 22w49d1

Programming

https://faultlore.com/blah/c-isnt-a-language/

Have you ever had luck/cry/luck to maintain C++ ABI compatibility between different linkable codebases, and found it fun? 🙂

The more I worked with C, the more quirks popped up. Some fun, some not-so-much.

This text is a must read to anyone trying to maintain compatibility between platforms with useful insights from the wild.

And very rare praise to Microsoft as de-facto kings in platform backward compatibility.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7825055/what-does-the-operator-do-in-c

While we are still on C language and its quirks, what ??!??! operator does in C? 🙂

I would not be surprised if this popped up as a question on ‘good’ interviews, which I would like to steer clear.

Recommended Tools

https://github.com/include-what-you-use/include-what-you-use

I came across this tool long time ago and found it quite handy, especially when working in C++ codebase.

Why? It has potential to one-time reduce your compile time insanely, by just removing include lines that have zero references from current code.
This is quite handy in C++ to limit number of translation units to be compiled, especially when small change in one header triggers big-but-unnecessary re-compilation chain.
And there is insane amount of header-only libraries or code-heavy headers that will exponentially fast increase compile time if not being careful what you include.

News

https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/31/opinion_column_relevance_in_business/

Interesting opinion about staying relevant with FOSS.

Weekly breakdown – 22w32d1

Programming

https://nnethercote.github.io/2022/07/27/twenty-years-of-valgrind.html

For the ones writing low-level and/or in ‘unsafe’ languages, Valgrind is one of the tool suites to use regularly.

Linked text from one of the creators of Valgrind provides brief of its interesting history, and more importantly, links to high quality papers describing how Valgrind actually works under the hood and is able to to what it does.

Note that Valgrind is not the only good tool that Nicholas and Julian have made.

Security

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/07/researchers-unpack-unkillable-uefi-rootkit-that-survives-os-reinstalls/

This is expected development since obfuscation-as-a-security method failed spectacularly in hack of Intel Management Engine in the motherboard chip-sets.

News

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-25/porsches-postponed-by-buggy-software-cost-vw-s-ceo-his-job

One of the first big names in car industry to be ‘eaten’ by software.

As all modern car manufacturers are moving to become software first company, they are also learning hard lessons that:

Current state of software engineering is less engineering and more craftsmanship, with all its implications on quality, planning, timelines and ‘manufacturing’.

The software craftsmanship is a separate topic for another day 🙂