Nov 7When Bad C++ Happens to Good PeopleA C++ Hazard Exposé — Introductory Remarks I can’t comprehensively give examples from the universe of C++ and std::* in a short article like this. Hopefully, I can give you a sense of how the kind of Bad Stuff I’m going to discuss happens. From this, take away the notion that kicking the tires on what is…Programming9 min readProgramming9 min read
Oct 23That’s Not Functional — It’s Just BadI have been ragging on “Modern C++” for months now and I have a new one. People often reach for C++ lambdas and funky compositions and call them “better” because it’s “functional”. This is getting tiresome. It is possible to write solid functional style code in C++, or almost any…Functional Programming6 min readFunctional Programming6 min read
Oct 18Wrathmark: An Interesting Compute Workload (Part 2)Context Continuing from the first article where we discussed the benchmark and the initial attempts to port it to C#, at this stage I started to make some changes in the codebase to try to improve the speed and get a sense of where the extra costs were coming from more…7 min read7 min read
Oct 18Wrathmark: An Interesting Compute Workload (Part 1)Context I had some interest in learning about how CLR performance had evolved in recent years and comparing how this evolution had happened on ARM vs. X64. I wanted to get a look at the raw CPU improvements that had been made via JIT tech and so I needed a benchmark…11 min read11 min read
Oct 10Basics, Simplicity, Speed, SuccessTwenty years ago I wrote this: From: Rico Mariani Sent: Wednesday, October 15, 2003 12:51 PM To: Bill Gates; Jim Allchin; Steve Ballmer; Eric Rudder Cc: [Other Names Elided] Subject: Basics, Speed, Simplicity, Success Overview I’m tired of people using managed code as the excuse for their performance problems. A…Performance11 min readPerformance11 min read
Oct 3Considerations for Big Virtual Memory PagesA few days ago, I wrote a couple of articles about Virtual Memory (as before I will use VM in this article to mean Virtual Memory not Virtual Machines). Virtual Memory, Segments, Paging and Big Pages Some VM follow-up information A lot of people jumped in and got their creative…Performance7 min readPerformance7 min read
Oct 1Some VM follow-up informationI kept wanting to write post-scripts to my previous article but that soon gets ridiculous so here are some follow-ups in the form of Q&A. Why mention the utility of odd page sizes that are supported basically nowhere? I have friends that work on CPUs. Some of them might be listening. Why not use big pages just for code or other things that don’t grow? The VM subsystem is actually primarily (IMO) in the business of giving…Performance4 min readPerformance4 min read
Oct 1Virtual Memory, Segments, Paging and Big PagesForeword — I’ve had a lively discussion the last few days on X (formerly known as Twitter). I learned some stuff and I thought it might be useful to try to share it. It all started with an innocuous tweet. I know enough about virtual memory management to be dangerous but the…Performance12 min readPerformance12 min read
Sep 25Performance Improvements in .NET 8This is a summary of the excellent and lengthy document by Stephen Toub In the interest of making it easier to find the original source material I have (nearly) reproduced the original outline with links to the original document and I will add some summary notes in each section. Keep…Performance14 min readPerformance14 min read
Sep 13Some Notes on Stateful Servers in .NETIntroduction Before I get into this at all, let’s give the usual disclaimers: the following is only going to be approximately correct because being fully correct takes way too many words this will be a generalization of different kinds of things which are likely to be important but might be more…Performance5 min readPerformance5 min read
