Always having enjoyed structures with arrows and vertices, I was happy to learn that Boost was considering welcoming a new member to its family of libraries: a finite state machine library called MSM. In my attempt to evaluate that library, it was natural to compare it with an existing Boost library for finite state machines, [...]
This is one of those rare non-technical entries in this blog. So, sit back and relax. What about me.com? Well, two things: Apple demonstrated this Ajax-based “Exchange” application on WWDC 2008 Key Note When typing it in me.com in my browser, I get to www.snappville.com! So, what is wrong here? [UPDATE: I saw this mentioned [...]
What? Yet another dynamic scripting language for the JVM? Are you not fed up with the Java-based, and rarely used, implementations of the hyped languages Ruby and Python? Sit down and let me explain. Groovy is actually not a brand new language, but rather an extension of Java. The difference between this extension and that [...]
I had a discussion with some friends at Lab49 about the merits of sealed overridden methods in C# (and .NET) and the discussion ended with some comments about it probably not helping with performance at least. The problem is that I do remember having seen that the JIT for .NET creates more efficient code for [...]
DISCLAIMER: this is not a usual, quite dry (did I hear boring? ) exposition of some more or less profound software construct, but quite personal and high-level, in that it talks about job interviews. I had a unique experience today. Not only was it one of very rare occasions when I cold-call somebody for a [...]
NOTE: since the automatic poll enumeration yields non-selectable radio buttons and some of the polls need context, I here manually enumerate polls and posts containing context-sensitive polls. [poll=1] Two specific polls about the coolest tricks in your development bag!
It just struck me how magical certain constructs and idioms must feel like for a “hard core” C developer when entering more abstract and/or functional and/or dynamically bound settings. It is also interesting how many – most? – people living daily in this more “modern” (I should use the word Indirect) world of tools and [...]
I earlier wrote about some ideas I had to combine the encapsulation of abstract data types with the swift case analysis plus decomposition of algebraic types. Why not have both worlds? Ok, when looking more into F# – after a few years of trying to stay away from it – I realize that it does [...]
There are some new hot web server frameworks: Ruby on Rails (Ruby), Yaws+ErlyWeb (Erlang) and HAppS (Haskell.) These new frameworks are supposed to facilitate fast development. But, how fast – and scalable – are the applications built in and for these frameworks? The goal of this post is to get a preliminary answer to this [...]
JVMTI is an API built into both JDK 5.0 and 6.0, enabling an aspect-oriented approach to dynamic analysis – such as performance and coverage analysis – without the overhead of ordinary AOP approaches. We all have experienced the need to find that performance bottleneck or that last crucial bug making our most vocal client crazy. [...]