Dr. Dobb's Blogs

The Long and Short of Parallelism

Wed, 23 May 2012 06:16:00 -0400

Ten years ago, multi-core processors were just on the horizon. Today they are mainstream and have become the impetus for a revolution in computer programming that can make best use of the two, four, six, or eight cores.

Bone Yard

Sun, 20 May 2012 21:25:00 -0400

The BeagleBone is a capable little Linux box.

The Solution to Last Week's Language-Design Puzzle

Thu, 17 May 2012 14:51:00 -0400

Anomalies, and design strategies for avoiding them, are among the many reasons that programming-language design is harder than it looks.

Ham It Up

Mon, 14 May 2012 06:37:00 -0400

Hamming distance is important in reliable systems and is also used in some cryptography algorithms.

The JavaFX SceneBuilder Tool

Mon, 14 May 2012 03:10:37 -0400

The Tell-Tale Compiler

Thu, 10 May 2012 19:49:00 -0400

In this post, I want to remind you to consider issues that your parallel code can encounter from the compiler.

Java Concurrency: The Executor Service

Thu, 10 May 2012 07:17:25 -0400

Exploring the Java Executor Service, which is useful for managing pools of threads, as well as the scheduling of future events

A Language-Design Puzzle in Operator Overloading

Wed, 09 May 2012 18:31:00 -0400

Resolving an overloaded function call involves finding a single possibility that is strictly better than all the others.

Voldemort Types In D

Mon, 07 May 2012 19:34:00 -0400

Sometimes, the confluence of existing features can yield unexpected surprises.

Stock in Trade

Fri, 04 May 2012 18:47:00 -0400

The classic trade in computer science is trading memory for execution speed.

Easy-to-Use ARM System on a Board

Thu, 03 May 2012 20:00:00 -0400

Raspberry Pi makes creating and programming ARM-based PCs trivially easy and a great deal of fun

A Personal Note About Argument-Dependent Lookup

Thu, 03 May 2012 19:24:00 -0400

One of the comments on my article last week noted that argument-dependent lookup in C++ is often called "Koenig lookup". I didn't invent it, but unfortunately, I don't know who did, so I don't know where the credit — or blame — is really due.

The Pit and the Parallelism: Memory Models

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 13:16:00 -0400

When I analyze parallel algorithms and how independent threads interact with each other across shared resources, I use the assumption of sequential consistency.

Mean Spirited

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 14:22:00 -0400

One of the more interesting things about programming for the "real world" is that you get to see a lot of practical applications for the math you learned (or didn’t) in school.

Java 7u4, JavaFX 2.1, and NetBeans 7.1.2

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 14:35:59 -0400

Garbage First (G1) garbage collector, Mac support, a brand new JVM implementation, and more goodies.

Object Swapping, Part 7: How Do You Call It?

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 06:13:00 -0400

We've talked about why swapping is important, and about how to use it to implement other operations such as assignment. We shall now look more closely at how to use it.

techBASIC 2.0 Now Available

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 03:35:25 -0400

techBASIC is a really powerful platform for students and individuals interested in learning how to program using Post PC hardware.

USB: The (Other) End

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 14:35:00 -0400

For the past several weeks I've been building a USB device using a PIC18F2550. This time around I wanted to wrap up with a discussion of the host software.

Object Swapping, Part 6: Exception Safety

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 10:41:00 -0400

Swapping has an important role to play in making operations exception safe.

Auto Types and Range-Based For Statements in C++11

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 10:41:00 -0400

Two really handy features in C++11 are the range-based for statement and the auto type specifier.

Java Concurrency: Queue Processing, Part 2

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 18:06:08 -0400

There are times when you need to process different actions in different threads, but they need to be coordinated using a hand-off pattern. With a SynchronousQueue, both sides of the queue (consumer and producer) will block until there is a corresponding producer and consumer, respectively.

Penultimate USB

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 12:59:00 -0400

The last several weeks, I've been talking about building a USB device using a Microchip PIC 18F2550.

Wearable Computing Evolves

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 07:13:45 -0400

With tablets becoming the new PCs, wearables could become the new mobiles.

Object Swapping, Part 5: A Fine Point About Overloading

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 06:10:00 -0400

Last week, a sharp-eyed reader pointed out a subtle pitfall in the code that I presented.

Reporting as Ordered

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 14:30:00 -0400

The main purpose of usb_descriptors.c is to define the "reports" the device can send.