I’ve now moved my coding blog permanently (or so I hope) to codeblog.jonskeet.uk. Please go there for new posts – and all my old content is there too, of course. I’m disabling comments on this blog, and will add a conspicuous banner too.
Introduction Recently I’ve been optimizing the heck out of Noda Time. Most of the time this has been a case of the normal measurement, find bottlenecks, carefully analyse them, lather, rinse, repeat. Yesterday I had a hunch about a particular cost, and decided to experiment… leading to a surprising optimization. Noda Time’s core types are mostly value types – date/time values are naturally value types, just as DateTime and DateTimeOffset are in the BCL. Noda Time’s types are a bit bigger than most value types, however – the largest being ZonedDateTime, weighing in at 40 bytes in an x64 CLR … Continue reading Micro-optimization: the surprising inefficiency of readonly fields
(Note that I’m not talking about "processing collections in parallel, which is definitely not an anti-pattern…) I figured it was worth starting to blog about anti-patterns I see frequently on Stack Overflow. I realize that some or all of these patterns may be collected elsewhere, but it never hurts to express such things yourself… it’s a good way of internalizing information, aside from anything else. I don’t guarantee that my style of presenting these will stay consistent, but I’ll do what I can… The anti-patterns themselves are likely to be somewhat language-agnostic, or at the very least common between Java … Continue reading Anti-pattern: parallel collections
I’ve always found Portable Class Library (PCL) configuration to be a bit of a mystery. In simple cases, it’s simple: start a new PCL project in Visual Studio, select the environments you want to support, and away you go. But what’s going on under the hood, and what do all the options mean? How do I do this without Visual Studio? Background: supporting Universal Windows Applications in Noda Time Recently, I had a feature request for Noda Time to support Windows Phone 8.1 and Universal Windows Applications. This is something I haven’t done before, but it doesn’t sound too hard … Continue reading Diagnosing Portable Class Libraries
This post is the answer to yesterday’s brainteaser. As a reminder, I was asking what purpose this code might have: public static class Extensions { public static void Add<T>(this ICollection<T> source, T item) { source.Add(item); } } There are plenty of answers, varying from completely incorrect (sorry!) to pretty much spot on. As many people noticed, ICollection<T> already has an Add method taking an item of type T. So what difference could this make? Well, consider LinkedList<T>, which implements ICollection<T>, used as below: // Invalid LinkedList<int> list = new LinkedList<int>(); list.Add(10); That’s not valid code (normally)…. whereas this is: // … Continue reading Extension methods, explicitly implemented interfaces and collection initializers
Just a really quick one today… What’s the point of this code? Does it have any point at all? public static class Extensions { public static void Add<T>(this ICollection<T> source, T item) { source.Add(item); } } Bonus marks if you can work out what made me think about it. I suggest you ROT-13 answers to avoid spoilers for other readers.
It’s been a scandalously long time since I’ve blogged about C#, and now that the first C# 6 preview bits are available, that feels like exactly the right thing to set the keys clacking again. Don’t expect anything massively insightful from me just yet; I’d heard Mads and Dustin (individually) talk about some new features of C# 6 at conferences, but this is the first opportunity I’ve had to play with the bits. There are more features to come, and I suspect that the ones we’ve got aren’t in quite the shape they’ll be in the end. First up, if … Continue reading C# 6: First reactions
I was recently directed to an article on "tiny types" – an approach to static typing which introduces distinct types for the sake of code clarity, rather than to add particular behaviour to each type. As I understand it, they’re like type aliases with no conversions between the various types. (Unlike plain aliases, an object is genuinely an instance of the relevant tiny type – it doesn’t have "alias erasure" as a language-based solution could easily do.) I like the idea, and wish it were better supported in languages – but it led me to thinking more about the existing … Continue reading How many 32-bit types might we want?
I see a lot of problems which look somewhat different at first glance, but all have the same cause: Text is losing "special characters" when I transfer it from one computer to another Decryption ends up with garbage Compressed data can’t be decompressed I can transfer text but not binary data These are all cases of transforming and (usually) transferring data, and then performing the reverse transformation. Often there are multiple transformations involved, and they need to be carefully reversed in the appropriate order. For example: Convert text to binary using UTF-8 Compress Encrypt Base64-encode Transfer (e.g. as text in … Continue reading Diagnosing issues with reversible data transformations
As I begin to write this, I’m in a small cubicle in Philadelphia airport, on my way back from CodeMash – a wonderful conference (yet again) which I feel privileged to have attended. Personal top highlights definitely include Dustin Campbell’s talk on C# 6 (I’m practically dribbling with anticipation – bits please!) and playing Settlers of Catan on an enormous board. Kevin Pilch-Bisson’s talk on scriptcs was fabulous too, not least because he demonstrated its NuGet support using Noda Time. I’m very likely to use scriptcs as a tool to ease folks into the language gently if I ever get … Continue reading A tale of two puzzles
