The Life of a Programmer

Performance is irrelevant

Asking questions about performance online universally invites scorn and accusation. A large number of programmers apparently feel that the efficiency of code is nowadays insignificant.

What is an atomic operation?

We all know that operations in a computer happen one after the other. Having multiple CPUs and instruction reordering tends to obfuscate the issue. Technically

CPU Memory – Why do I need a mutex?

Multi-threaded programming calls for semaphores, synchronized blocks, mutexes, or whatever your language happens to call them. Most of us basically understand why we need them: