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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++

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.

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

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

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

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

We’ve more or less set­tled in our new apart­ment, and we’ve got inter­net… sort of! Con­tinue read­ing Get­ting back on track

Sorry for the lack of updates. I haven’t for­got­ten about this blog, but real life has kept me busy. The lease on my apart­ment expired Novem­ber 1st, so the last two months or so have been spent try­ing to find a new apart­ment (with greater and greater urgency as the dead­line got nearer). Con­tinue read­ing Still busy

By now, I’ve read an awful lot of papers about STM sys­tems, and cer­tain trends are really start­ing to stand out, not so much in terms of the algo­rithms used or the clever schemes invented to make trans­ac­tions appear atomic, but in how they inter­face with the actual language.

It has really under­lined to me just how deeply entrenched most Java, C and C++ pro­gram­mers are in the imper­a­tive mind­set. Con­tinue read­ing Being func­tional in an imper­a­tive language

We’re near­ing the end!

Part I focused on the very fun­da­men­tals of C and C++, mak­ing sure that you under­stand the build sys­tem and the very basics of the syntax.

Part II expanded on this to teach you all the C++ you’ll need to do basic work in the lan­guage, includ­ing a few use­ful parts of the stan­dard library, such as vec­tors and strings.

You now know all the basics we need, and the actual Win32 API should now be very sim­ple to deal with. Not ele­gant or con­sis­tent, but com­pre­hen­si­ble as long as you keep a close eye on the doc­u­men­ta­tion and take noth­ing for granted.

Con­tinue read­ing A .NET Devel­op­ers Guide to C++ (part III)