Anurag RANA

Corruption seems to be most important issue for many people. While I disagree with the notion that it is the most important problem, I have bigger issues with the kind of solutions that are proposed. This post is aimed at dispelling the common notions about how to solve corruption. Let us take a simple example. Given below is a typical problem. Problem : We all visit our neighborhood shop/store to buy groceries or other items. However, these shopkeepers never give us any bills. Since they don’t give any bill, obviously the shop is saving its taxes. But all big brands like Big Bazaar do give a bill. They are corporates, easier to track. From a customer’s point of view, they get their products much cheaper at neighborhood stores since there is no tax. How many such shops are there across the country? How much tax is being lost by the Government? How can we fix this? Now if I were to ask you to solve this problem, how would you do that? I posed the same question ...

Modern object-oriented programming languages such as Java, JavaScript, Ruby, and C# are becoming ubiquitous. A primary reason for this trend is that these languages provide automatic memory management (garbage collection), which relieves programmers of the burden of explicitly freeing memory that is no longer needed. Professor Kathryn McKinley at the University of Texas at Austin has led an NSF-funded research project, in collaboration with Steve Blackburn at the Australian National University, that is exploring how to build the software infrastructure that executes managed programs, i.e., programs in languages that provide automatic memory management. Garbage collection provides a number of software engineering benefits such as preventing common programmer memory errors that are among the most difficult to diagnose and fix. However, in the past, programs in garbage collected languages tended to be slower. The garbage collector makes a classic time-space tradeoff tha...