internals

C++ has multiple inheritance. The implementation of multiple inheritance at the assembly level can be quite complicated, but there are good descriptions online on how this is normally done (vtables, pointer fixups, thunks, etc). Java doesn't have multiple implementation inheritance, but it does have multiple interface inheritance, so I don't think a straight forward implementation with a single vtable per class can implement that. How does java implement interfaces internally? I realize that contrary to C++, Java is Jit compiled, so different pieces of code might be optimized differently, and

I've been working with databases for the last few years and I'd like to think that I've gotten fairly competent with using them. However I was reading recently about Joel's Law of Leaky Abstractions and I realised that even though I can write a query to get pretty much anything I want out of a database, I have no idea how the database actually interprets the query. Does anyone know of any good articles or books that explain how databases work internally? Some specific things I'm interested in are: What does a database actually do to find out what matches a select statement? How does a database

While working on a C# app I just noticed that in several places static initializers have dependencies on each other like this: static private List<int> a = new List<int>() { 0 }; static private List<int> b = new List<int>() { a[0] }; Without doing anything special that worked. Is that just luck? Does C# have rules to resolve this? Edit: (re: Panos) In a file lexical order seems to be king? what about across files? In looking I tried a cyclical dependency like this: static private List<int> a = new List<int>() { b[0] }; static private List<int> b = new List<int>() { a[0] }; and the program didn

How does git determine that a particular merge has a conflict and what the conflict is? My guess would go something like this: if the two commits being merged have a common parent commit, and if they have both changed line X from what the parent had, that's a conflict. What complicates my understanding is: "Changing line X" can mean replacing it with several new lines, and that's still shown as one conflict (version A has this one line, and version B has these 5 lines, or whatever) If you did insert lines in one of the commits, a dumber algorithm would think that all subsequent lines had