About code. Mostly on C++
A recent question on stackoverflow raised the problem of a fast algorithm to count the unique colors in an image (Faster algorithm to check the colors in a image). My answer what that this kind of problems are suited for parallelization. However, parallelization may only help when used judiciously. To demonstrate the point I have … Read more
At the beginning of this year, Microsoft announced a “C++ renaissance”. Quoting from the description of a Channel 9 video with Craig Symonds and Mohsen Agsen: C++ is currently undergoing a renaissance. This means that, by definition, the language, compilers and compositional tooling are evolving and coalescing into a state that maximizes native developer efficiency, … Read more
Microsoft has recently announced at the AMD Fusion Developer Summit the introduction of a new technology called C++ Accelerated Massive Parallelism or shortly C++ AMP that helps C++ developers use the GPU for parallel programming. The new technology will be part of Visual C++, integrated with full support (edit, build, debug, profile) in the next … Read more
Channel9 recently posted a video with the Parallel Computing Concurrency Runtime team talking, mainly, about tasks and continuations, new features to the Parallel Patterns Library. These are already available through the ConcRT Extra’s Sample Pack. You can watch the half hour interview with the team here. Besides the new stuff they shown, I particularly liked … Read more
At the beginning of this year I have posted a short questionnaire on concurrency on my blog. I have promised to publish the results, so here they are. The number of respondents was 27 (and not everybody answered all the questions). Q: What is your role in application development? Q: How many cores has your … Read more
I think application development faces two challenges nowadays: 64-bit and multi-core/many-core hardware. Switching from 32 to 64 bit is just another step in the evolution of processors. There was a time when we switched from 8 to 16, and then from 16 to 32. There are problems that arise every time, but probably in 10-20 … Read more
On of the most important challenges nowadays in programming is concurrency. If we don’t learn to write programs that are able to run on multiple cores the progress in hardware will be pointless. But when you run multiple threads for various processing you might face the situation when you have to write over and over … Read more
Microsoft has made available a first beta version of an experimental version of .NET 4.0, called .NET Framework 4.0 Beta 1 Enabled for Software Transactional Memory v1.0. Since that is quite a long name, the short one is STM.NET. This is a special version of .NET 4.0 that enables software transactional memory for C#. It … Read more
Last week Microsoft published on DevLabs a .NET language for building parallel applications, called Axum, and earlier known as Maestro. This new language is build on the architecture of the web, on the principles of isolation, message-passing, fault-tolerance, loose-coupling. It is said to have a more succinct syntax than Erlang, and have the isolation advantage … Read more
I recently found an interesting problem on the web, about reducing words, letter by letter until only one letter remains. Here is a formal definition: We define word reduction as removing a single letter from a word while leaving the remaining letters in their original order so that the resulting sequence of characters is also … Read more