On the subject of rants...

Here's a good one, by Jeff Roberts, a developer for the hugely popular RAD Game Tools. It discusses aliasing in C (more precisely, problems that strict aliasing rules in compilers cause that screw up his code results).

Strict aliasing can result in large performance benefits via compiler optimizations, but it can 'break' otherwise valid code (even the Linux kernel doesn't follow the rules: see lkml.org for a post by Linus Torvalds regarding the insanity.)

The original post from Jeff titled Strict Aliasing... makes for amusing and illuminating reading, as does the rest of his blog. I think he and I would get along swimmingly.

Rob