In my previous article the mess of virtual functions, I show how easily they introduce bugs and propose language extensions to fix it. Several comments suggested an alternate solution with the “non-virtual […]
A pattern bandage for messy virtual functions
The very real mess of virtual functions
Virtual functions, though generally a blessing, have a defect-prone dark side. No language, that I know of, provides a way to encode when the base class should be called. This leads to […]
The simple things I want in a text editor
A good text editor is the most important tool for me. My favourite text editor, Kate is unfortunately broken after upgrading from Kubuntu 12.04 to 16.04 (several things simply don’t work anymore). […]
Is reference counting slower than GC?
“Reference counting is slower than garbage collection”, a claim often made in the discussion of memory management. I heard it again recently when discussing Leaf; somebody took issue with my arguments against […]
What is the cost of reference counting?
Reference counting is a common form of memory management. In some languages, like Python, it’s the natural way objects are tracked, and in others it’s in the standard library, such as shared_ptr […]
What is the length of a string? A tricky question
Every day millions of programmers require the length of a string. Despite this there is no universal definition of what string.length actually represents. It changes between languages, and quite often doesn’t return […]
A pan, zoom, and rotate gesture model for touch devices
No mobile app would be complete without a few gestures. I already had swiping in place, so now I turned my attention to panning, zooming, and rotation. These nicely round out of […]
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