Top all-time · #1319
Ian Lance Taylor
Personal blog · airs.com/blogprogrammingsystems
Ian Lance Taylor writes AIRS, a personal blog at airs.com about programming and systems. Since 2008, 53 different Hacker News readers have linked it 105 times, most often “Linkers (2007)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (25) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Linked for Ian Lance Taylor's blog on linkers, including his 20-part linker essay, and on GCC, Go and compiler optimizations. Commenters cite it as a reference for linker and toolchain questions.
- Recommended for · 9 comments
- Called 'great', 'the best piece on linkers', 'wonderful' (the 20-part linker essay) and a 'good post' on optimizations; 'interesting'.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 25 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Linkers (2007)5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2019-09-02
- Linkers, part 1 (2007)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2010-03-28
- Gccgo in GCC3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-12-04
- Leaving Google2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-05-11
- Const – Ian Lance Taylor (2010)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-03-06
- The US 2016 Election (2017)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-09-24
- The Conversation Game2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-05-27
- Linkers Part 42 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-03-31
- Go Interfaces, by one of the Go authors2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2009-11-27
- /blog/archives/572 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-03-28
What Hacker News says?
Ian Lance Taylor has been involved in the language for a long time, since 2008. Here he is talking about the built-in function append and why it shouldn't really exist in 2017 https://www.airs.com/blog/archives/559
Comment linking /blog/archives/559
on “The Next Step for Generics”Submitted Leaving Google as a story · 565 points
HN discussionInterestingly, the blog has very few posts. What I would really like to read is a follow up to https://www.airs.com/blog/archives/552 (“The 2016 Election”)
Comment linking /blog/archives/552
on “Leaving Google”Submitted Linkers (2007) as a story · 81 points
HN discussionHere is a great explanation of why setting up a cross compiler is so difficult. http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/492
Comment linking /blog/archives/492
on “Quake III bounty: we have a winner”Submitted Linkers, part 1 (2007) as a story · 51 points
HN discussionhttps://www.airs.com/blog/archives/51 Pattermatching on assembler code and rearranging and reusage of sequences..
Comment linking /blog/archives/51
on “A deep dive into how linkers work (2008)”Submitted Debugging (2003) as a story · 46 points
HN discussionBest piece on linkers is in my opinion Ian Lance Taylor's (author of the gold linker) write up[1]. It obviously has been written in a hurry and could need some polish but the content is gold. LWN published an overview with links to the different parts, to make it a little more accessible[2]. I always hoped Ian would turn it into the book he mentioned in the post. [1] https://www.airs.com/blog/archives/38 [2] https:/…
Comment linking /blog/archives/38
on “Beginner's Guide to Linkers (2010)”Submitted GNU gold developer on linker basics (2007) as a story · 36 points
HN discussion> The articles I see on the sites you list are typically narrow, sensationalist, or self-serving. I'm shocked that you would say that about LWN, or Ian Lance Taylor's blog, or Landon Dyer's blog, or James Hamilton's blog, or Google Research Videos. It's so far from reality that I feel compelled to ask if you've actually read them. > many of them are written to gain votes on these sites, which are themselves advertis…
Comment linking /blog/archives/464
on “The need to code”Submitted GCC Summit as a story · 9 points
HN discussion> There just isn't anything on the web that compares. (or if there is, please please tell me!) The breadth and depth of well-written technical information available on the web is far, far beyond what was available in Byte in its heyday. Consider: http://lwn.net/Articles/428530/bigpage http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/category/programming http://hackermonthly.com/issue-10.html http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/ ht…
Comment linking /blog/archives/category/programming
on “The need to code”Submitted Go Experience Report: The Append Function as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThat's because ELF allows symbol interposition and PE (Portable Executable) doesn't have a comparable feature. Symbol interposition doesn't come without a price, though, and is often criticized: https://www.macieira.org/blog/2012/01/sorry-state-of-dynamic... | https://www.airs.com/blog/archives/307 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8029564
Comment linking /blog/archives/307
on “Using LD_PRELOAD to cheat, inject features and investigate programs (2013)”Submitted Tcl: a brief overview of language design gone wrong as a story · 4 points
HN discussionIt looks like the optimization I remember was implemented in gccgo, but maybe they never added it to the main compiler: http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/277
Comment linking /blog/archives/277
on “Safe Native Code”Submitted Gccgo in GCC as a story · 4 points
HN discussionIan Lance Taylor (author of the gold linker) wrote a wonderful 20 part essay to how linkers work: http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/38 I'd also recommend reading the rest of his blog, at least the programming section. It's very insightful.
Comment linking /blog/archives/38
on “How statically linked programs run on Linux”Submitted Go Interfaces, by one of the Go authors as a story · 4 points
HN discussionIan Lance Taylor, contributor of the GCC Go frontend addresses the same concern, in http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/448 Basically, yes, it'll be increasingly out of date. Edit: clarity.
Comment linking /blog/archives/448
on “GNU Compiler Collection 4.6.0 released with Go programming language support”Submitted DejaGNU (2011) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThe common case is (probably) not that a compiler detects an instance of signed over/underflow. Instead, it can assume that this never happens and generate "dangerous" code. A good post describing how these optimizations come about is http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/120 More options to warn about uses of or disable these optimizations would be welcome in compilers.
Comment linking /blog/archives/120
on “C and C++ Aren't Future Proof”Submitted Linkers: A 20 Part Series as a story · 3 points
HN discussion> Why bother running through a destructor chain ... The Gold linker (written in C++) doesn't ( http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/362 ): "[I]n the gold linker I often deliberately omitted destructors, because many of the data structures live for the life the program; in such a case, destructors serve only to slow down program exit." However, there are some things that you really want to know happened when the process…
Comment linking /blog/archives/362
on “C++11 FQA anyone?”Submitted C++ 'const' as a story · 3 points
HN discussionAlso by Ian Lance Taylor: A New ELF Linker https://storage.googleapis.com/pub-tools-public-publication-... Gold https://www.airs.com/ian/gold-slides.pdf
Comment linking /ian/gold-slides.pdf
on “A ToC of Ian Lance Taylor’s 20-part Linkers essay (2008)”Submitted Interviewing programmers as a story · 3 points
HN discussionMore information here: http://www.airs.com/blog/archives/448
Comment linking /blog/archives/448
on “Go compiler now committed to gcc mainline (to be gcc 4.6)”Submitted JSON Schemas in Go as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
