Alan Cox on writing better software is a good read; even going so#

Mon, 11 Oct 2004 13:11:33 +0000

Alan Cox on writing better software is a good read; even going so far as to recommend the use of modern languages (GC, type safety, etc). Probably doesn't tell you anything you don't already know, but comes as a refreshing change after some of Linus's more widely quoted "you have to be a Real Programmer to hack on Linux" comments.

An example of this is, with locking, instead of having one function for taking a lock and another function for releasing the lock, which inevitably means that someone always has an error handling or an unusual case where they forget, you have a single function which calls another function locked; it takes the lock, calls the function, and drops the lock.

Unless the function performs some kind of non-local exit, at least. Makes you glad to have UNWIND-PROTECT (that's finally in Java, for any readers I have left that don't speak Lisp) - and of course WITH-LOCK-HELD. C++ has that whole resource-acquitision-is-initialization pattern thing instead, which probbaly does the job just as well.

(I'm so mellow today. I think I'm sickening for something)

Discuss: what relation does taint checking have to type checking/inferencing? Both are about carrying attributes of an object around with that object, and in operations involving that object, combining the object attributes in some way (some fairly trivial way, if it's just a single bit that says 'tainted') to get the attributes of the result. It might (though I'm not sure it's necessary) be desirable to `untain' an object in-place, whereas it's rare to want to change its type (although even then I can think of several systems I've used CHANGE-CLASS in).