RTLinux retrospective
Kuth’s Merge Sort in C
Taken from Knuth Algorithm S mergesort P162-163 Vol 3 Second edition 1998 The major change is that the scratch buffer is not required to be adjacent and there are some changes because C array indexing usually starts with 0. This
don’t defer
There is a proposal to add “defer” to C. Its biggest example is taken from code that was originally designed to not manage storage at all, but to run once and exit – delegating all the cleanup to exit. The
Mathematics errors in computer science
A trivial theorem, more of a tautology, on networking and Turing’s deep theorem on decidability are both widely cited, widely misunderstood and widely misapplied in computer science. It is often claimed that Fischer, Lynch, Patterson (FLP) “theorem” on networks shows
Unforgivable C programming 1
As many people never tire of explaining, the C language is obsolete, unsafe, unwelcome in polite company and generally looked down on by thought leaders and adepts of λ calculus alike. Here’s a program that exhibits the lamentably low level
Process algebra and automata theory
Milner’s Communication and Concurrency contrasts a notion of “bisimulation” with what he characterizes as the view in standard automata theory. Standard automata theory, however, has a much more interesting and well defined notion of both equivalence and concurrency than what
Lecture notes on Paxos
PAXOS – (c) Victor Yodaiken, 2022 These are the lecture notes, or see the paper. 1. Really clever distributed consensus algorithm by Leslie Lamport A. Infamously hard to understand – but not complicated B. Livelocks – can get stuck without
Threads in C
There is a nice example thread semantics in a paper by David Goldblatt (P1916R0) which illustrates a couple of things about multi-core processing – including how interesting it is and how poorly defined the C11 atomic/thread extension is . A
Open Source, Free Music Downloading, and Intellectual Property
“A day is coming, when, in the eye of the law, literary property will be as sacred as whisky, or any other of the necessaries of life.” —Mark Twain” Inventors, programmers, writers, and musicians often get the same advice for