Viewing profile — chrchang523

and you CAN use static_cast to convert from void*; this silently keeps working if you refactor the void* into a matching-type pointer later, while raising a compilation error if yo…

Other things worth noting about denormal numbers: - It’s not just ‘old’ FPUs that handle them verrry slowly. Benchmark this aspect of your target processors if this detail matters.…

Note that BGZF solves gzip’s speed problem (libdeflate + parallel compression/decompression) without breaking compatibility, and usually the hit to compression ratio is tolerable.

Yes, though I think tooling could be better; if I had more spare time I'd write a linter which flagged defers in loops that didn't come with an accompanying comment.

The problem with cgo is the high function-call overhead; you only want to use it for fairly big chunks of work. Calling an assembly function from Go is a lot cheaper. https://pkg.g…

I found it useful to walk through evaluation of a few elementary instances of this class using simpler methods, to put the main result in perspective. Specifically, replace the ini…

Two-bit values are common in bioinformatics, and I’ve found the ability to efficiently convert between packed arrays of 1- and 2-bit values to be valuable in that domain.

One question: it is possible for the XOR of two consecutive floating-point numbers to have 32-63 leading zeros; the numbers 32-63 do not fit in 5 bits. I imagine this is treated by…

(2008)

The mod 1000 is actually a consequence of the test format: all answers are integers in [0, 999], you fill in 3 digit-bubbles.

Suppose the value of a network to an individual user is proportional to the number of users. Then the total value of the network, summed across all its users, is proportional to th…

Yup, and that's why I'd consider this a "101" essay. The larger exponential-growth trends (e.g. Moore's Law) practically always have a microstructure with many sigmoid curves. Afte…

The slave-owners were slave-owners because they had military control over the slaves. (Most of the time, anyway; some slave revolts were successful.) It is not clear how long human…

Yup. This 24-year-old game was so culturally significant in the Eastern Bloc that there was a piano concert in Warsaw dedicated to it last month: https://gmfest.com/2023/06/19/paul…

No, the idea is that you manually make some allocations downward from the top and some allocations upward from the bottom. The bumping code is as simple as in the unidirectional ca…

Incidentally, you can choose to bump in both directions. It's more complicated (you need to keep track of which end you allocated each data structure on), but in exchange, the allo…

I recently started running HOMM3 HD on my Mac with Porting Kit, which has been working great: https://www.portingkit.com/game/236 .

Sure, but there isn't even an offhand remark about how hacky this kind of polling is. It's presented as if it's a completely normal way to do things in reliable software.

Agree, I'm shocked at how ugly the recommended alternative is. This does not make MS look good.

Raymond Chen has been providing an inside perspective on this for decades: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/

(2015)

The possibilities you mention are definitely worth keeping in mind. However, they are not an exhaustive list; there are positive scenarios that are better than "trying to squeeze a…

Do you? I don’t like it, but the government is allowed to pay off the debt with inflated dollars.

Rare virtue, but I wouldn’t say it was unprecedented: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucius_Quinctius_Cincinnatus

There are games where the final score is primarily based on taking as little time as possible (e.g. the Heroes of Might and Magic series, which had its debut around the same time a…