by jalf
A term that’s become very popular, and which especially Microsoft’s developers seem to champion, is “dogfooding”. The idea that as a developer, you should use your own products on a daily basis, even during development. This exposes you to all the weaknesses and flaws of the product, and makes you much better equipped to deliver a product that’s actually worth using.
Continue reading The downside to “dogfooding”
by jalf
I tried really hard to come up with some witty title or pun to weave into the title of this post. I couldn’t. RAII is just a terrible name, and it isn’t really clever or funny. Unfortunately, it is also the single most important key to C++. It is not just an idiom but a fundamental philosophy used to solve almost any problem in the language. So we can’t really avoid it.
If I had to pinpoint one thing that marked the difference between a skilled and an unskilled C++ programmer, it would be “do they understand RAII”. Many people don’t, hence this post. Continue reading The meaning of RAII — or why you never need to worry about resource management again
by jalf
As I mentioned earlier, I’d like to celebrate the new year by calling out a few products I’d like to see improved in the new year.
First in line is Microsoft’s C++ compiler and IDE. Continue reading Hopes for 2010: Microsoft Visual C++
by jalf
So it’s the new year. Yay! How time flies when you’re having fun.
I don’t know about you, but I had a blast this last year. New (awesome) apartment, started on my thesis, launched this blog, and just generally had a good time.
So how to follow it up? What can 2010 do to beat this?
Rather than coming up with a whole bunch of new year’s resolutions for myself, I thought it might be more interesting to reverse the process — and say what I’d like to see others do in the coming year.
Throughout the year, I’ve encountered a lot of software products that, for one reason or another, I’d like to see improve. Perhaps they simply suck currently, and desperately need to be fixed — or perhaps they’re already so good that I’m happy to use them, but I can think of further improvements that’d really make the “best in class”.
So for the next couple of days, I’ll post my thoughts on what I’d like to see from a few of these products during the coming year.
Hope you have a great new year’s eve! See you next year.
by jalf
A friend recently asked me for “the simplest optimization problem I could think of”. This led to a fun discussion of low-level optimization and how the CPU executes your code. And so I decided to share it here. Continue reading Adventures in Microoptimizations
by jalf
Ever since I signed up on StackOverflow.com roughly a year ago, I’ve had an OpenID. On the whole, I think it’s a great concept, and I wish more sites would allow me to sign in with it.
However, a few things have been bothering me about it. Continue reading OpenID 2.0 and HTTP redirects
by jalf
Ouch. These last few days, I’ve been fixing a few lingering bugs in my STM system, and last night, I finally nailed them. Specifically, it is now possible to open variables within a transaction as read-only. An obvious optimization, right? At least that’s the idea. Less work is required by the STM system if we can trust that the variable isn’t modified by this transaction.
Continue reading Houston, we have a (performance) problem
by jalf
As promised yesterday, I’d like to show off a few bits of my STM library. Of course it’s far from done, and is still missing several key features, but the core library is in pretty good shape. So as they say on the internets, “my STM library, let me show you it” Continue reading Using My STM Library
by jalf
We’ve more or less settled in our new apartment, and we’ve got internet… sort of! Continue reading Getting back on track