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How many hours a day can you write code, and at what point does the quality of your work go down? Even more important is how many weeks and months of that max effort you can still be effective. In my life, there have only been three periods where I
6 months ago

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More from The Codist

Stress And Programming

Having spent four decades as a programmer in various industries and situations, I know that modern software development processes are far more stressful than when I started. It's not simply that developing software today is more complex than it was back in 1981. In that early decade, none

a month ago 22 votes
What Is Software Quality?

Everyone wants the software they work on to produce quality products, but what does that mean? In addition, how do you know when you have it? This is the longest single blog post I have ever written. I spent four decades writing software used by people (most of the server

2 months ago 27 votes
Using Xcode's AI Is Like Pair Programming With A Monkey

I've never used any other AI "assistant," although I've talked with those who have, most of whom are not very positive. My experience using Xcode's AI is that it occasionally offers a line of code that works, but you mostly get junk

4 months ago 36 votes
Giving Junior Engineers Control Of A Six Trillion Dollar System Is Nuts

For some purpose, the DOGE people are burrowing their way into all US Federal Systems. Their complete control over the Treasury Department is entirely insane. Unless you intend to destroy everything, making arbitrary changes to complex computer systems will result in destruction, even if that was not your intention. No

4 months ago 44 votes
What I Miss And Don't From Working As A Programmer

I retired almost four years ago after nearly 40 years as a programmer. While I still write code daily, I do so to support my generative art rather than get paid for it. Most of my career was spent building new applications, and no matter what my title was, I

4 months ago 49 votes

More in programming

2025-06-22 Sun: Ban std::string

The use of std::string should be banned in C++ code bases. I’m sure this statement sounds like heresy and you want to burn me at stake. But is it really controversial? Java, C#, Go, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, PHP: they all have immutable strings that are basically 2 machine words: a pointer to string data and size of the string. If they have an equivalent of std:string it’s something like StringBuilder. C++ should also use immutable strings in 97% of situations. The problem is gravity: the existing code, the culture. They all pull you strongly towards std::string and going against the current is the hardest thing there is. There isn’t a standard type for that. You can use newish std::span<char*> but there really should be std::str (or some such). I did that in SumatraPDF where I mostly pass char* but I don’t expect many other C++ code bases to switch away from std::string.

3 hours ago 1 votes
In Praise of “Normal” Engineers

This article was originally commissioned by Luca Rossi (paywalled) for refactoring.fm, on February 11th, 2025. Luca edited a version of it that emphasized the importance of building “10x engineering teams” . It was later picked up by IEEE Spectrum (!!!), who scrapped most of the teams content and published a different, shorter piece on March […]

3 days ago 6 votes
Optimizing calling Windows DLL functions in Go

Go team wrote golang.org/x/sys/windows package to call functions in a Windows DLL. Their way is inefficient and this article describes a better way. The sys/windows way To call a function in a DLL, let’s say kernel32.dll, we must: load the dll into memory with LoadLibrary get the address of a function in the dll call the function at that address Here’s how it looks when you use sys/windows library: var ( libole32 *windows.LazyDLL coCreateInstance *windows.LazyProc ) func init() { libole32 = windows.NewLazySystemDLL("ole32.dll") coCreateInstance = libole32.NewProc("CoCreateInstance") } func CoCreateInstance(rclsid *GUID, pUnkOuter *IUnknown, dwClsContext uint32, riid *GUID, ppv *unsafe.Pointer) HRESULT { ret, _, _ := syscall.SyscallN(coCreateInstance.Addr(), 5, uintptr(unsafe.Pointer(rclsid)), uintptr(unsafe.Pointer(pUnkOuter)), uintptr(dwClsContext), uintptr(unsafe.Pointer(riid)), uintptr(unsafe.Pointer(ppv)), 0, ) return HRESULT(ret) } The problem The problem is that this is memory inefficient. For every function all we need is: name of the function to get its address in a dll. That is a string so its 8 bytes (address of the string) + 8 bytes (size of the string) + the content of the string. address of a function, which is 8 bytes on a 64-bit CPU Unfortunately in sys/windows each function requires this: type LazyProc struct { Name string mu sync.Mutex l *LazyDLL proc *Proc } type Proc struct { Dll *DLL Name string addr uintptr } // sync.Mutex type Mutex struct { _ noCopy mu isync.Mutex } // isync.Mutex type Mutex struct { state int32 sema uint32 } Let’s eyeball the size of all those structures: LazyProc : 16 + sizeof(Mutex) + 8 + 8 = 32 + sizeof(Mutex) Proc : 8 + 16 + 8 = 32 Mutex : 8 Total: 32 + 32 + 8 = 72 and that’s not counting possible memory padding for allocations. Windows has a lot of functions so this adds up. Additionally, at startup we call NewProcfor every function, even if they are not used by the program. This increases startup time. The better way What we ultimately need is uintptr for the address of the function. It’ll be lazily looked up. Let’s say we use 8 functions from ole32.dll. We can use a single array of uintptr values for storing function pointers: var oleFuncPtrs = [8]uintptr var oleFuncNames = []string{"CoCreateInstance", "CoGetClassObject", ... } const kCoCreateInstance = 0 const kCoGetClassObject = 1 // etc. const kFuncMissing = 1 func funcAddrInDLL(dll *windows.LazyDLL, funcPtrs []uintptr, funcIdx int, funcNames []string) uintptr { addr := funcPtrs[funcIdx]; if addr == kFuncMissing { // we already tried to look it up and didn't find it // this can happen becuse older version of Windows might not implement this function return 0 } if addr != 0 { return addr } // lookup the funcion by name in dll name := funcNames[funcIdx] /// ... return addr } In real life this would need multi-threading protection with e.g. a mutex. Saving on strings The following is not efficient: var oleFuncNames = []string{"CoCreateInstance", "CoGetClassObject", ... } In addition to the text of the string Go needs 16 bytes: 8 for a pointer to the string and 8 for the size of the string. We can be more efficient by storing all names as a single string: var oleFuncNames ` CoCreateInstance CoGetClassObject ` Only when we’re looking up the function by name we need to construct temporary string that is a slice of oleFuncNames. We need to know the offset and size inside oleFuncNames which we can cleverly encode as a single number: // Auto-generated shell procedure identifier: cache index | str start | str past-end. const ( _PROC_SHCreateItemFromIDList _PROC_SHELL = 0 | (9 << 16) | (31 << 32) _PROC_SHCreateItemFromParsingName _PROC_SHELL = 1 | (32 << 16) | (59 << 32) // ... ) We pack the info into a single number: bits 0-15 : index of function in array of function pointers bits 16-31: start of function name in multi-name string bits 32-47: end of function name in multi-name string This technique requires code generation. It would be too difficult to write those numbers manually. References This technique is used in https://github.com/rodrigocfd/windigo win32 bindings Go library. See e.g. https://github.com/rodrigocfd/windigo/blob/master/internal/dll/dll_gdi.go

4 days ago 5 votes
Lessons along the EndBOX journey

How a wild side-quest became the source of many of the articles you’ve read—and have come to expect—in this publication

5 days ago 6 votes
Making System Calls in x86-64 Assembly

Watch now | Privilege levels, syscall conventions, and how assembly code talks to the Linux kernel

6 days ago 7 votes