Archive for March 2013

Wanted: live leak detection for FastMM

One of the awesome things about FastMM is FullDebugMode.  Its features pretty much make memory leaks trivial to track down… usually.  But if you’ve got the classic problem of code creating objects and placing them in a container somewhere and then abandoning them, you can have a huge memory leak in your program without it ever being detected, just as long as the container gets properly cleaned up before the program shuts down.

Seems to me that it should be possible to detect this with a bit of instrumenting, though.  Here’s the basic idea. Continue reading ‘Wanted: live leak detection for FastMM’ »

The US Supreme Court just ruled that publishers have no right to differential pricing

If you’ve been paying attention to copyright and the myriad ways it gets abused by publishing interests, you’ve probably heard of the Kirtsaeng case.  For those just tuning in, here’s quick recap:

John Wiley & Sons is a publishing company, involved in one of the most despicable fields within the publishing industry: the publication of academic textbooks.  Anyone who’s ever been to college and had to pay the exorbitant rates they charge every semester, just because they can, will need no explanation as to why these guys are scum.

The interesting thing is, while they charge whatever they can, “whatever they can” means different things in different contexts.  Some parts of the world are wealthier than others, and in some countries there’s just less blood available to be squeezed from that particular stone, and so they have to set the prices lower so as not to be unaffordable.

Anyone with a basic knowledge of economics, when presented with these facts, should recognize that an opportunity for arbitrage exists here: buying goods in a low-priced market and reselling them at a profit, where the prices are high.  And that’s exactly what this Thai guy called Supap Kirtsaeng did. Continue reading ‘The US Supreme Court just ruled that publishers have no right to differential pricing’ »

The next RTTI bottleneck

A few years back, when I posted an analysis of how TValue is very slow, it prompted a lot of response from the community.  Various people ran their own benchmarks, and started working on building or optimizing their own meta-value types.  Some people are even still working on that today.  But one of the most interesting things was Robert Love’s response.  He looked at the TValue code and found a way that it could be optimized for the common case to speed things up. Continue reading ‘The next RTTI bottleneck’ »