So, Patrick, how was your long weekend?

I took this past Monday as a vacation day. Upon returning, I sent this email to the team, and they suggested I post it here.


Upon returning from my vacation day, some of you may ask how my long weekend …

The Case for a Logarithmic Performance Metric

Traditional comparisons of benchmark results focus on percentage differences. While seemingly simple to understand and compute, such comparisons pose a number of problems that are solved by using a different basis for comparison: a logarithmic unit with the rather unfortunate …

Measuring information in millibytes

A thousandth of one byte. Does such a thing even exist?

Yep, it does. I’ve used them before.

How to debug an optimizing compiler

Suppose you work on an optimizing compiler that has a bug, causing the compiled program to …

Malloc Envy

Folks using programming languages with automatic garbage collection (GC) often feel that it’s a price worth paying. I disagree: outside of some fairly limited circumstances, there’s no price to be paid at all.

If your application is short-running, or …