Programming – Lords Of Tech

How are data stored in a .gz format?

Gz format was created as an open source alternative to other compression formats, first released in 1992 with the zlib library as its reference implementation. Owing to its permissive licence, it has become one of the most widespread compression algorithms over the years, used for example as part of the HTTP protocol or in the .png file format. It is faster and easier to use than formats like 7zip, bz2 or xz, but its compression ratio is worse. Newer compression formats like zstd have both better compression ratio and better performance than .gz, but they are not used in common protocols.

How I used Huffman coding to easily create a translator into a fictional language

With modern computers, creating a language doesn’t have to be time-consuming. Actually, far less time-consuming than learning a language.

Dependency injection – superb flexibility within monoliths

Dependency injection is a software design where a component does not initialise its dependencies, but these dependencies are passed into…

You can define template methods in .cpp files without explicit instantiation, as long as they are private

For years I’ve been programming in C++ with the belief that the bodies of template methods had to be in headers. Only recently I learned that splitting template methods between header and source is, in fact, often perfectly fine.

Stop telling C/C++. There is C and then there is C++.

Ever been criticised for using totally working C code in a C++ codebase just because it wasn’t proper C++? Here’s why you shouldn’t have done it.

Adding elements to arrays and changing variables during compilation – imperative meta-metaprogramming in C++

If you follow these steps, you might learn to write things normally impossible to do in compile time, such as self-registering factory.

C++20 Resumable functions: Goodbye state machines, no one will mourn you

C++20 allows writing functions that suspend and can continue at the next line. This has an amazing application at avoiding writing annoying and error-prone state machines. This article showcases how coroutines can clean up a function that would usually need an ugly state machine.

Error codes are far slower than exceptions

TL;DR On modern 64-bit PC architectures, C++ exceptions only add unreachable code with destructor calls into functions and their effect on performance is below 1%, but such low values are difficult to measure. Handling rare errors with return values requires additional branching that slows down the program in realistic scenarios by about 5% and are also less convenient. If an exception is actually thrown, stack unwinding costs about 2 µs per stack frame.

The Sisyphean task of enabling Adobe Flash Player in a modern QT/Chromium based web browser

Prologue and motivation A part of my PhD. research deals with computer science as a source of innovative ways to…

(Sort of) Reflection in C++11

This is yet another trick to achieve reflection-like functionality before Reflection TS, this time needing only C++11. It’s based on using CRTP to fill the object with carefully chosen garbage before initialisation.