4 days agoWhy I Think Rust Is The Way ForwardIntroduction I want to begin by making it clear that what I’m about to write is significantly an opinion piece. I have a lot of experience and data (see references below) to back up my thoughts but the how/why/when of all of this for any given situation is still an open…13 min read13 min read
May 12A teardown of Rust pointer types and functorsIntroduction I wanted to come back to some of my tests of key structures and look in detail at what Rust does so I made test cases that were analogous to the C++ versions I did a few weeks ago. I had a pretty good idea what to expect but I…Software Development12 min readSoftware Development12 min read
May 11How Not To Protect Your Data With LocksI wanted to write an article on good ways to create thread-safe access to a variety of data structures, but I found myself increasingly frustrated on this topic because there are many possible patterns and it’s very hard to select any particular pattern to recommend universally. So instead, I thought…Software Development8 min readSoftware Development8 min read
May 4A Taxonomy of Performance PitfallsI’m often asked how I tackle performance problems. There is no one answer of course — there are many ways you can get bad performance in any given system — but I’ve found that just a few high-level categories are pretty good at telling the story. I don’t want to…Software Development7 min readSoftware Development7 min read
Apr 30Hotspots, Premature Optimization, Hoare’s MaximCasey Muratori has released an excellent video debunking five reasons why people/teams often, in fact in my opinion, nearly always, think that they can simply ignore performance issues and they don’t even want to talk about them. His top-level debunked points are: No need : i.e. processors are fast enough…Software Development7 min readSoftware Development7 min read
Apr 11A discussion of C++ pointer hazards with detailsI want to talk about pointer hazards today and I thought this would be a good time to introduce various assumptions compilers can and can’t make and therefore assumptions engineers can and can’t make. Now we’re going to end up discussing shared_ptr<foo> and threading considerations but I wanted to start…Cplusplus15 min readCplusplus15 min read
Apr 7As plain as elephant nose-hairI was trying to get data on some very short time intervals involving microprocessor phenomena and caching effects. The time differences were ranging between 5ns and 70ns depending on the experiment configuration. …Programming2 min readProgramming2 min read
Apr 6std::function teardown and discussionThis is the third and final (for now) C++ teardown in which we look at the code generation for functors. Note that I have forced functors to be created here, even in this simple example, so that we can look at the code. The below could of course have been…Cplusplus13 min readCplusplus13 min read
Apr 5std::string— a tear down and comparison/discussionI did a series of investigations on the costs associated with some of the more popular Modern C++ features. This was actually the first one I did, but I’m publishing it second, because I’m random like that. Here I’m going to compare old school char * strings with std::string. The…Cplusplus12 min readCplusplus12 min read
Apr 5std::pointer types — a tear down and discussionI was wanting to get a more complete understanding of exactly what code gets generated when we compile some typical smart pointer patterns in C++ so I created a sample app that did some of the things. I then looked at the disassembly and annotated it heavily. Now we should…Cplusplus31 min readCplusplus31 min read
