You work in a bar, pouring pints for the locals. One of your regulars comes in; he’s looking pretty grumpy today. “Whiskey” he snaps. You put down a glass and pour. You finish pouring and he necks back the drink. “Again”, he snaps. Again, you pour and as soon as you finish he necks it. This repeats two or three more times before the grumpy man slams down the money for his tab and leaves. Congratulations, you have just taken part in a “Producer/Consumer” exchange.
Author: evilrix
An expert in cross-platform ANSI C/C++ development; evilrix specialises in high performance/low latency solutions and complex meta-template programming techniques, using Boost and the latest ANSI C++ standard.
Variadic Functions the C++11 way
The C++11 standard introduced so called Variadic Templates. These have many uses, one of which is the ability to write functions that take any number of arguments without having to mess around with C-style non-type safe “var-args” and printf like format specifiers.
Down-casting re-visited
In my previous article I discussed the difference between up-cast and down-cast and explained why down-casting is rarely a good idea (or even necessary). That said, there are a few times when down-casting is valid and so this article shows how to do so, safely, in C++.
Bloodlines and casting
When working with objects that have an inheritance model you basically have an inverted tree that represents your object hierarchy. Contrary to a normal everyday trees, an inheritance tree has its root at the top. In other words, the root of the tree represents the base class and anything below it represents a more derived class. Continue reading “Bloodlines and casting”
LRU Cache Implementation
One of the problems any developer will eventually have to resolve is one of latency; specifically, being able to retrieve and process data in a timely fashion. This issue can come in many guises but they generally manifest as needing to read data from a backing store that cannot deliver the high performance needed by the application. This can be a tricky problem to solve but the general method is to implement some form of caching. The remainder of this article will discuss one caching mechanism, called the LRU Cache.
Geo-indexing problem
Imaging you have a map and on that map you define a bunch of geo-locations; polygons, which are defined by their vertices as latitude and longitude co-ordinates. These geo-locations may overlap and may either be very big or very small (or in-between). The problem is to figure out, for any point on the map, which of these geo-locations bound it.
Doubt and uncertainty!
The C and C++ standards documents can be a bit of a beast to trawl through and quite often you’ll find yourself reading the same sentence a number of times trying to fathom out what it is actually saying. It’s just like when you read the EULA for a software product; lots of big words and long sentences that don’t actually seem to make a lot of sense.
C++11 r-value references
The C++03 standard treats temporary types as r-values (types only meant to go on the right hand side of an assignment expression). As such, it is only possible to bind a temporary to a const reference type. This is a somewhat arbitrary and, often, frustrating rule. The original idea was that there would be no good reason to modify a temporary; however, it turns out that there are plenty of good reasons for doing so and this arbitrary restriction was just a nuisance that served no good cause.
Technical Debt
Regular readers (do I actually have any, I wonder?) of my blog may be wondering why I’ve not posted any new content for the last few weeks. First off, let me apologise for this. Secondly, let me explain why: I’ve been busy… in my new job! That’s right, ladies and gentlemen, everyone’s favourite evil one has finally found himself employment again.
The basics of Spam detection
During my numerous years as a software engineer I have spent many an occasion developing solutions to combat Spam. This article introduces the origins of spam and then looks at a number of ways it can be detected.
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