Here is a a really very detailed explanation (with examples) of how a program ends up going from code to an executable that your processor can run. This post details all of the steps along the way, from the original code, compiling, compiler optimizations, assembly, machine code, etc. The Birth and Death of a Running [...]

“The C programming language was devised in the early 1970s as a system implementation language for the nascent Unix operating system. Derived from the typeless language BCPL, it evolved a type structure; created on a tiny machine as a tool to improve a meager programming environment, it has become one of the dominant languages of [...]

A really interesting in-depth question was posted over at stackoverflow.com asking why 1 loop seems to be so much slower than 2 loops. The discussion on the page goes into great and interesting detail on what’s going on behind the scenes and why there is such a decrease in speed between 1 and 2+ loops. [...]

Really interesting article from Rob Pike, a member of the Unix team and Plan 9. Here’s a short excerpt from the article: “Kernighan and Plauger’s The Elements of Programming Style was an important and rightly influential book. But sometimes I feel its concise rules were taken as a cookbook approach to good style instead of [...]

“The best candidate I have been able to come up with is the C/Unix/Posix use of NUL-terminated text strings. The choice was really simple: Should the C language represent strings as an address + length tuple or just as the address with a magic character (NUL) marking the end? This is a decision that the [...]

So it appears that the next iteration of C++ has officially been dubbed C++11 and has been approved by the technical standards committee. This is the next official iteration of the C++ programming language. The standardization of the language allows it to be used on virtually every machine from every implementation provider. The standardization usually [...]