
“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 […]
“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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Queues are a common part of modern software. Scheduling jobs and actions isn’t just for distributed systems, but for any system dealing with external events or asynchronous processing. It’s easy to grab […]
Good products can be hampered by relatively minor design issues. After a long period of development it’s often tempting to push something through the door despite its flaws. It is important to […]
On 9 February human error resulted in 11 deaths and 80 further casualties in tragic wreck near Bad Aibling, Germany. Despite a supposedly robust safety system, a lone operator was capable of […]
I started using the mach_absolute_time function on iOS to get proper event timing information. It works well, I think; the problem is that I actually don’t know what this function is supposed […]
floor and ceil have the bad habit of producing unexpected results. They aren’t broken, but in light of floating point nasties can often result in a number that’s ±1 of the desired […]
I recently implemented a swipe gesture for Fuse. The gesture recognition itself, though complex, was not hard to implement; I had most of the needed pieces already. Designing a user friendly, declarative […]
Are our discussions about errors focusing on the right part of the problem? We tend to argue about what exceptions mean, or how return values are messy. But if I look at […]
Virtual functions are a great feature, but they have a rather severe limitation. They can only be implemented by extending the definition of all classes involved. A lot of operations on classes […]
In a dreamy programming utopia, functions behave correctly and nothing unexpected ever happens. In technical reality however even the most mundane of actions can suffer failures and errors. It’s a misguided notion […]
“Exceptions are bad because they introduce non-local flow into a program.” It’s an argument I’ve seen often and it even came up in the comments in my previous article. It’s nonsense though. […]