Get the latest tech news

Walking around the compiler

Walking around outside is good for you.[citation needed] A nice amble through the trees can quiet inner turbulence and make complex engineering problems disappear.

In addition to the immediate effects of being able to spot-check certain inputs and outputs, continued use of these tools builds long-term intuition about the behavior of the compiler. I haven’t written a lot about mechanical sympathy other than my grad school statement of purpose(PDF) and a few brief internet posts, so I will leave you with that for now. One time I found a bizarre reference counting bug that was causing copy-on-write and potential memory issues by noticing that some objects that should have been marked “immortal” in the IR were actually being refcounted.

Get the Android app