The latest Effective Concurrency column, “The Many Faces of Deadlock”, just went live on DDJ’s site, and also appears in the print magazine. From the article:
… That’s the classic deadlock example from college. Of course, two isn’t a magic number. An improved definition of deadlock is: “When N threads enter a locking cycle where each [...]
Archive for July, 2008
Effective Concurrency: The Many Faces of Deadlock
Posted in Concurrency on July 31, 2008 | 3 Comments »
Constructor Exceptions in C++, C#, and Java
Posted in C# / .NET, C++, Java, Software Development on July 25, 2008 | 34 Comments »
I just received the following question, whose answer is the same in C++, C#, and Java.
Question: In the following code, why isn’t the destructor/disposer ever called to clean up the Widget when the constructor emits an exception? You can entertain this question in your mainstream language of choice:
// C++ (an edited version of the original [...]
Research Firms Are Good At Research, Not Technology Predictions
Posted in Hardware, Opinion & Editorial on July 21, 2008 | 6 Comments »
This story has been picked up semi-widely since last night. I’m sure this Steven Prentice they quote is a fine (Gartner) Fellow, but really:
The computer mouse is set to die out in the next five years and will be usurped by touch screens and facial recognition, analysts believe.
Seriously, does anyone who uses computers daily really [...]
Kindling
Posted in Hardware, Opinion & Editorial on July 16, 2008 | 10 Comments »
Two weeks ago, I broke down and bought a Kindle. I like it:
It’s a good and well-designed reader, and the experience is much better than the other e-book reading I’ve done before on phones and PDAs. I like how when you bookmark a page, you can see it… the corner of the page gets a [...]
Hungarian Notation Is Clearly (Good|Bad)
Posted in C++, Software Development on July 15, 2008 | 22 Comments »
A commenter asked:
thread_local X tlsX; ??
Herb, I hope you aren’t backtracking on Hungarian Notation now that you work for Microsoft. Say it aint so…
It ain’t so. Besides, Microsoft’s Framework Developer’s Guide prominently intones: “Do not use Hungarian notation.”
Warts like “tls” and “i” are about lifetime and usage, not type. Here “tls” denotes that each thread [...]
Trip Report: June 2008 ISO C++ Standards Meeting
Posted in C++ on July 4, 2008 | 28 Comments »
The ISO C++ committee met in Sophia Antipolis, France on June 6-14. You can find the minutes here (note that these cover only the whole-group sessions, not the breakout technical sessions where we spend most of the week).
Here’s a summary of what we did, with links to the relevant papers to read for more details, [...]
