Month: March 2009

Go on, ask me anything

By jonskeet

This afternoon, I found a comment which had been trapped in the spam bin for this blog. It was from Andrew Rimmer, in reply to my “micro-celebrity” post, pointing me at http://askjonskeet.com The world has officially become extremely silly. The surprising thing is, it’s actually useful – at least for me. A number of times I’ve wanted to find my old answers to questions, so I can either just refer to them in a new answer or mark the new question as a dupe. You might have thought that a simple search such as exceptions site:stackoverflow.com “jon skeet” would suffice … Continue reading Go on, ask me anything

Buffering vs streaming benchmark: first results

By jonskeet

My poor laptop’s had a busy weekend. It’s run 72 tests, rebooting between each test. Most of these tests have kept both the CPU and disk busy for a lot of the time. I expect to update this blog post with more numbers – and possibly more strategies – as time goes on, but I wanted to get the numbers out as quickly as possible. Graphs should be coming when I’ve got a decent network to experiment with Google graphing. Source code and setup While I don’t really expect anyone else to sacrifice their computer for the best part of … Continue reading Buffering vs streaming benchmark: first results

Benchmarking IO: buffering vs streaming

By jonskeet

I mentioned in my recent book review that I was concerned about a recommendation to load all of the data from an input file before processing all of it. This seems to me to be a bad idea in an age where Windows prefetch will anticipate what data you need next, etc – allowing you to process efficiently in a streaming fashion. However, without any benchmarks I’m just guessing. I’d like to set up a benchmark to test this – it’s an interesting problem which I suspect has lots of nuances. This isn’t about trying to prove the book wrong … Continue reading Benchmarking IO: buffering vs streaming

Breaking Liskov

By jonskeet

Very recently, Barbara Liskov won the Turing award, which makes it a highly appropriate time to ponder when it’s reasonable to ignore her most famous piece of work, the Liskov Substitution (or Substitutability) Principle. This is not idle speculation: I’ve had a feature request for MiscUtil. The request makes sense, simplifies the code, and is good all round – but it breaks substitutability and documented APIs. The substitutability principle is in some ways just common sense. It says (in paraphrase) that if your code works for some base type T, it should be able to work with subtype of T, … Continue reading Breaking Liskov