13/Apr 2015
12 min. read
In the last month or two I’ve had basically the same conversation half a dozen times, both online and in real life, so I figured I’d just write up a blog post that I can refer to in the future.
The reason most high level languages are slow is usually because of two reasons:
They don’t play well with the cache. They have to do expensive garbage collections But really, both of these boil down to a single reason: the language heavily encourages too many allocations.
22/Feb 2013
8 min. read
Specializing code is nothing new, but I’m surprised that modern programming languages don’t attempt to make this easier.
Just to give you some context, the idea is that whenever you have an algorithm that takes multiple parameters where one or more of the parameters are fixed for some period of time, you specialize the code for the fixed parameters in order to achieve greater optimization at runtime. A key idea is that you may not know at compile time what the fixed value is, and the duration for which a value is fixed could be shorter than the execution of the program (mere milliseconds, even).
3/Dec 2010
3 min. read
As the years go by and I see more and more painful bugs and convoluted architectures in OOP systems the more convinced I am that implementation inheritance is almost always the wrong answer, and that some kind of trait/mixin/delegation system is superior.
Inheritance sucks partly because you’re expected to extend a class that you didn’t write (or that you at least ostensibly plan to modify independently), by patching into a few of the methods here and there and mucking around with the “protected” innards.
