Published
I’ve promised to write a blog post about the DIY polymorphic classes implementation in Xanthe, the experimental game I once wrote for bare-metal X86. But first, I decided to write a precursor post that explains how polymorphism and inheritance work in the first place.
Published
My first small business wasn’t actually in the software industry. Back when I was a student, I did contract office jobs in the summer holidays to pay for things while I was studying. I got a feeling that I’d be happier self-employed than someone else’s employee, so after graduation I experimented with registering an Australian Business Number (ABN) and using it to do maths and sciences tuition. I went back to working for other companies eventually, but I learned a lot from the experience, and that know-how was extremely valuable later when I quit my full-time job to start my own little consulting business.
I might write more about that experience some other time, but for now I want to write about what’s been hardest for me to get used to: when you’re self-employed, no one cares how much work you do.
Published
How many ways can you fill a 9x9 grid, obeying all the rules of the sudoku puzzle? The answer is too big to just calculate directly on a computer, so an exact answer takes careful analysis. But if an absolutely exact answer isn’t required, we can get a good statistical approximation using a Monte Carlo algorithm. As a bonus, the algorithm doesn’t need any application-specific analysis and works on many other problems, too. It’s a handy “stupid things that work” approach to solving problems.
Published
Information theory gives us a way to understand communication systems, by giving us a way to understand what happens to information as it’s transmitted or re-encoded.
We can also study what happens to complexity in a software system as components depend on or interface each other. Just like we can make rigorous arguments about how much information can be compressed, we can make arguments about how much complexity can be simplified, and use this to make better choices when designing software systems.
Published
D’s runtime is a recurring hot topic, but there’s obviously a lot of confusion about what the D runtime even is. I gave a quick explanation during my talk at DConf 2017, but I decided to write a blog post because I’ve seen confusion since then, and because I think blog posts are just a much better format for technical stuff, anyway.
Published , Updated
After my previous post on using D for C-like programming, I wondered about going deeper. What’s the minimum it would take to run C-like D code on a PC? Could it run straight from a BIOS bootloader?
If you seriously want to make an OS, you’re much better off using an existing bootloader like U-Boot or GRUB, or at least using UEFI. But doing it this way is interesting because the x86 PC has an insane level of backwards compatibility, and booting from the BIOS to a modern high-level language is like doing an archealogical dig through the past 40 years of computing history.
Published , Updated
Functional purity is a valuable concept for writing maintainable code, though outside of functional programming languages like Haskell, it’s often treated like a nice-but-expensive luxury. But it turns out that pure functions that aren’t quite so pure can be cheap while still having concrete benefits for code in non-functional languages like C++, Java and Python. For D code, this is supported by the language itself, but there’s nothing D-specific about the overall idea.
