UPDATE: This question was the subject of my blog in September 2014. Thanks for the great question! There is considerable debate on this question even within the compiler team itself. First off, it’s wise to understand the rules. A public member of a class or struct is a member that is accessible to anything that … Read more
The purpose of the config() function is to allow you to perform some global configuration that will affect the entire application – that includes services, directives, controllers, etc. Because of that, the config() block must run before anything else. But, you still need a way to perform the aforementioned configuration and make it available to … Read more
isn’t this illegal in C#? If “int” is only alias for “Int32” it should fail to compile with error CS0523. Is there some magic in the compiler? Yes; the error is deliberately suppressed in the compiler. The cycle checker is skipped entirely if the type in question is a built-in type. Normally this sort of … Read more
In MRI the object_id of an object is the same as the VALUE that represents the object on the C level. For most kinds of objects this VALUE is a pointer to a location in memory where the actual object data is stored. Obviously this will be different during multiple runs because it only depends … Read more
Utility or helper classes/methods that you would like to access from many other classes within the same assembly, but that you want to ensure code in other assemblies can’t access. From MSDN (via archive.org): A common use of internal access is in component-based development because it enables a group of components to cooperate in a … Read more
Summary: Git’s pack files are carefully constructed to effectively use disk caches and provide “nice” access patterns for common commands and for reading recently referenced objects. Git’s pack file format is quite flexible (see Documentation/technical/pack-format.txt, or The Packfile in The Git Community Book). The pack files store objects in two main ways: “undeltified” (take the … Read more
The details of how a debugger works will depend on what you are debugging, and what the OS is. For native debugging on Windows you can find some details on MSDN: Win32 Debugging API. The user tells the debugger which process to attach to, either by name or by process ID. If it is a … Read more
This is bcrypt: Generate a random salt. A “cost” factor has been pre-configured. Collect a password. Derive an encryption key from the password using the salt and cost factor. Use it to encrypt a well-known string. Store the cost, salt, and cipher text. Because these three elements have a known length, it’s easy to concatenate … Read more
The Git book contains an article on what an index includes: The index is a binary file (generally kept in .git/index) containing a sorted list of path names, each with permissions and the SHA1 of a blob object; git ls-files can show you the contents of the index: $ git ls-files –stage 100644 63c918c667fa005ff12ad89437f2fdc80926e21c 0 … Read more
This is implementation-specific, but your interpreter is probably interning compile-time constants but not the results of run-time expressions. In what follows CPython 3.9.0+ is used. In the second example, the expression “strin”+”g” is evaluated at compile time, and is replaced with “string”. This makes the first two examples behave the same. If we examine the … Read more