Every programmer has it… you know how there’s that one day every couple weeks where nothing works and all your ideas are bad? It’s no more than 5% of your time. In a team of five, you don’t even have 1/4 of a programmer worth of bad ideas, so there’s no power there. Imagine a …
Category Archives: rant
Cache effects
Quick call out to an illustrative blog entry on various cache effects. http://igoro.com/archive/gallery-of-processor-cache-effects/ When someone bugs me about “X is too slow, because it has to make a virtual call”, and I get annoyed, it’s because a hot virtual call is an overhead of some dozen cycles or so. Missing the cache? In the thousands. …
On the value of consistent API design
Raymond Chen writes in “We’re using a smart pointer, so we can’t possibly be the source of the leak“. The most immediate cause is a subtle misuse of CComPtr, using operator= which performs an AddRef on a return value that has already been AddRef’d, leading to one AddRef too many. The less immediate failure was …