steved is currently certified at Journeyer level.

Name: Steve Dodd
Member since: 2000-04-07 14:47:03
Last Login: 2016-06-02 09:09:10

FOAF RDF Share This

Homepage: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Steved424

Notes:

I was mostly "net.dead" for a long time due to illness
(severe depression). As part of that - or perhaps, as part
of my (partial) recovery - I've been losing interest in
things Linuxy, Unixy, or techy in general.

Projects

Recent blog entries by steved

Syndication: RSS 2.0

I've been 'net.dead' for a seriously long time, it seems - at least when it comes to places such as Advogato, Slashdot, and other dens of technicity. It's been years, in fact (can it really be nearly five? Yes, apparently it can).

My interest in things Linux-y, Unix-y, and other technical topics has waxed and waned over the interim, but now seems to be firmly, permanently dead. I think you could still describe me as a hacker, I'm just interested in deeper and more fundamental 'systems' now.

I still have both a home page and a blog, should you be interested in what I'm doing these days. You might want to start by checking out Alan Carter's Reciprocality project.

I've just been reading mettw's diary entry on C++, and I'd like to make a few a comments (shame we can't do reverse links):

After getting used to C++ for dbXML I really can't understand why anyone would want to use it. It's an inefficient garbage bin of features.

Inefficient? Can we have some examples here? Sure, if you declare all your methods virtual, you're going to take a hit on the double indirection for each call. So don't do that. Use virtual only in places where you'd use function pointers in C. There's a more general point here, I think. You can produce unreadable, inefficient piles of cruft in C++, and it may be easier to do than in C. But I think with careful and thoughtful design you can also write easier-to- read code in C++.

While debugging it I saw the number of lines it had to go through just to pass a string object to a method - You really have to see it to beleive it!

I assume you're talking about lines of assembler generated here. Do you mean a pointer to the object, or the object itself? More to the point, can you demonstrate that your compiler's (possibly) lousy code generation is a result of flaws in the design of the language?

I can understand going through that many lines with a higher level language, but with C++ being so low level you really have to ask what the point of the language is. With C++ you get the bloat of higher level languages with the pain in the arse debugging of C.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'd rather see some more detailed reasoning here. If you believe the generated code in your example to be inefficient, is this the fault of the compiler, the language standard itself, or the author of the code for not understanding the implications of what he/she was doing?

Erk, missed the last day of UKUUG's Linux Developers' Conference by sleeping right through it :-/ I'd made the stupid decision to travel up each day and as a result was completely knackered by last night. Hopefully davej will forgive me (I'd promised to meet him this morning..)

Due to one thing and another, I'm away from home for a bit, and therefore effectively workstation-less - I don't consider this P120 running Win95 to be workstation ;-) As a result, I'm thinking about spending money I don't really have on a laptop. I'm currently looking at the Quadra 133 from DNUK.

Thought I'd nailed the cause of the loop device deadlock, but was quickly disabused by Stephen Tweedie and Jens Axboe. Time to return to the code with a pen and paper handy - but probably not right now, given I've been awake for 30hrs or so.

2 older entries...

 

steved certified others as follows:

  • steved certified alan as Master
  • steved certified hpa as Master
  • steved certified alecm as Master
  • steved certified rmk as Master
  • steved certified davej as Journeyer
  • steved certified riel as Master
  • steved certified davem as Master
  • steved certified axboe as Journeyer
  • steved certified prumpf as Journeyer

Others have certified steved as follows:

  • clausen certified steved as Journeyer
  • jimd certified steved as Journeyer
  • Zaitcev certified steved as Apprentice
  • riel certified steved as Apprentice
  • axboe certified steved as Journeyer
  • thom certified steved as Journeyer
  • paulr certified steved as Journeyer
  • AntonA certified steved as Journeyer
  • savs certified steved as Journeyer
  • chakie certified steved as Journeyer
  • hiddenpower certified steved as Journeyer
  • keller certified steved as Journeyer

[ Certification disabled because you're not logged in. ]

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser code is live. It needs further work but already handles most markup better than the original parser.

Keep up with the latest Advogato features by reading the Advogato status blog.

If you're a C programmer with some spare time, take a look at the mod_virgule project page and help us with one of the tasks on the ToDo list!

X
Share this page