NeverSleepOnThreadContention–NOT!

FastMM is a wonderful memory manager, but it can slow down quite a lot when used in multithreading environment. While Pierre has implemented some conditional defines that could help the multithreaded code, namely NeverSleepOnThreadContention and SwitchToThread, I’m now making a point that you shouldn’t ever use them! Just see for yourself.

Meet Me in Verona

I know that XE2 on Win64, OS/X and iOS is all the rage but some of us (or is it most of us?) still have to make living in the Win32 world. That’s why my ITDevCon 2011 talks are not focused into specific technologies but into techniques and tools that will make your life easier. (At least your life as a programmer, that is.)

If you have time and you live close enough, come to Verona at the end of October and meet many interesting people. Lots of speakers, three separate tracks, free lunch and wifi – what do you want more? David I is rumored to be there, Marco Cantù will lead sessions all the time and you’ll have a chance to talk to me. I’ll be giving four sessions, some targeted at beginners, some at experienced programmers. (All between those extremes are also invited, of course.)

Life after 2.1: Parallel data production [Introducing Parallel.Task]

An interesting problem appeared on StackOverflow shortly ago – how to generate large quantities of data as fast as possible and store it in a file. (As one could expect) I wrote a parallel solution using OmniThreadLibrary, more specifically the Parallel.ForEach high-level primitive. I’m not posting the complete solution here, just the important part – a method that accepts two parameters, requested file size and output stream, and generates the data. Actual initialization of data buffers is delegated to the FillBuffer method which you can see in the StackOverflow post.

Life after 2.1: Pimp My Pipeline

While the biggest focus on the Pipeline improvement was on the exception handling, there were also some changes in the basic functionality.

The most important (and code breaking!) change happened to the Input function, which was renamed to From. If you now want to pass a input queue to a pipeline, use pipeline.From(queue).

Second code breaking change happened to the Run function which now returns IOmniPipeline (i.e. the pipeline interface) itself, not the output blocking collection. Luckily, both changes will be caught by the compiler which would not want to compile the old code any more.