The Life of a Programmer

Is reference counting slower than GC?

“Reference counting is slower than garbage collection”, a claim often made in the discussion of memory management. I heard it again recently when discussing Leaf;

The string type is broken

My previous article, “We don’t need a string type“, caused a bit of stir. Though the feedback is mixed, there is a common theme of

How to catch a “return” statement

Does ‘return’ always cause a function to return? Surprisingly the answer is “no”. Indeed there are situations in which ‘break’ may not always break from

1/2 Should Not Equal Zero

There’s something wrong when a language allows 1/2 to equal 0. It’s easy to understand why this happens, and perhaps it’s even easy to forgive