Again, I’ll be answering some questions I’ve received in my inbox, just like in the previous post of this series.

I want to know how to declare a const variable in one file and access it from other files? (C++) by Ricardo Orozco (Venezuela).
It’s a fairly basic question, and reveals that you have to study more [...]

Abstractions
I do strongly believe in abstraction being the root of computing (however, you may want to read Is abstraction the key to computing? as a motivation for a different perspective on the role of abstraction in computing). Modern hardware and software systems include a lot of features and perform so many tasks that it is [...]

Today, a friend of mine reported a problem with gettimeofday() under MinGW. It was a relatively common error: ‘gettimeofday’ undeclared (first use this function). Cause and solution of this problem is kind of easy, and we’ll present it at the end of the post. However, what’s that function gettimeofday()?
gettimeofday() is a function for retrieving system [...]

Generally speaking, an Application Binary Interface (ABI) is the interface between an application program and the operating system. Conceptually, it’s related to the more well-known API concept. But ABIs are a low-level notion, while APIs are more leaned toward the application source code level.