I like using enums and type hierarchies. What I don’t like is writing verbose switch statements to use them. In C++ I use macros to significantly reduce the burden of creating visitors. […]
Using macros to simplify type visitors and enums
What is an idempotent function?
Idempotence is an essential tool in programming. It has many uses, from improving fault tolerance, clarifying code, to writing declarative deployment scripts. It’s important to understand what idempotent means. There are a […]
What is amortized time?
Amortized time is often used when stating algorithm complexity. Instead of giving values for worst-case performance it provides an average performance. This is appropriate in many domains, but we must be careful. […]
Visiting nodes in a recursive data type with traversal contexts
Iterating over the elements of a recursive data structure can be difficult. Given a set of objects, where each object could potentially link to any other object, how do we visit each […]
The false abstraction antipattern
Useless interfaces, factories, and other abstractions are everywhere. They are the result of trying to prematurely generalize code. In a recent article I wrote about how I removed one from Leaf. It […]
Counterargument: Don’t put logic in tests
I consider test suites to be first class code. They need to be clean, adaptable, and frequently refactored just like the primary code. Thus I was quite bothered to see the article […]
Why more eyes are helpful: time wasted on a simple bug
I spent several hours trying to fix a defect that didn’t exist. I’m working on template methods in Leaf and one of my overloads wasn’t resolving. As it is a new feature […]
Why social media needs to manipulate you
Has Facebook really done something deviant with their emotional feed experiment? Sure, it is despicable and unethical, but it wasn’t truly different from what is done on social sites every day. The […]
A curious non-OOP virtual inheritance for a GPU
A new technology I’m trying has a curious domain-specific extension for OpenGL graphics. It introduces a block concept allowing for modular shader code. From a language standpoint I was uncertain what to […]
Removing code by adding features
The pinnacle of refactoring is the removing of code by introducing a new feature. It may seem like a ridiculous notion, but I’m often surprised myself at how often it is a […]
Another Spam Loser: WordPress and Akismet
It seems like WordPress may have lost the war on comment spam. Up until early this year the spam was quite well filtered, Akismet was doing a good job. Then slowly undetected […]
Wait-free queueing and ultra-low latency logging
To support a low-latency trading system I needed a logging call that had minimal impact on the calling thread. It was imperative to be responsive to market events at all times. My […]
The uninitialized variable anathema: non-deterministic C++
A variable with an undefined value is a terrible language failure. Especially when programs tend to work anyway. It’s a significant fault of C++ to allow this easy-to-create and hard-to-detect situation. I […]
Allowing unlimited access with CORS
Opening a REST service for browser use requires CORS. Browsers have a very strict cross-domain policy that will either block the request, or just block access to the returned content. If you […]
