ACCU World of Code

I have been sharing some details about my latest book “Learn C++ by Example”, and gave an overview of chapter 6 last time.You can buy my book directly here: http://mng.bz/AdAQ – or just go look at the table of contents. You can also buy …

I have been sharing some details about my latest book “Learn C++ by Example”, and gave an overview of chapter 6 last time.You can buy my book directly here: http://mng.bz/AdAQ – or just go look at the table of contents. You can also buy …

Following through an exercise using a trait object with dynamic dispatch to choose different behaviour at runtime. Series: Language basics, More syntax, Traits and generics, Building applications, Concurrency and parallelism, Trait objects, Async, Uns…

I am really excited to say I was elected to the Governing Board of the Matrix Foundation! I was really surprised because there were lots of people standing, and the quality of the candidates was very high, but I am one of the lucky ones. I hope I can d…

Trying out the typestate pattern by tracking the state of a 3D printer by changing our type instead of updating a variable whenever it changes. Series: Language basics, More syntax, Traits and generics, Building applications, Concurrency and paralleli…

Some good patterns to follow in your code e.g. “newtype”, “typestate” and one to avoid. Series: Language basics, More syntax, Traits and generics, Building applications, Concurrency and parallelism, Trait objects, Async, Unsafe This section (Trait obj…

I have been sharing some details about my latest book “Learn C++ by Example”, and gave an overview of the chapter 5 last time.You can buy my book directly here: http://mng.bz/AdAQ – or just go look at the table of contents. You can also buy i…

Some good patterns to follow in your code e.g. “newtype”, “typestate” and one to avoid. Series: Language basics, More syntax, Traits and generics, Building applications, Concurrency and parallelism, Trait objects, Async, Unsafe This section (Trait obj…

Trying to explain why the rules for object safety are the way they are, and how to create and use a trait objects. Series: Language basics, More syntax, Traits and generics, Building applications, Concurrency and parallelism, Trait objects, Async, Uns…

I’m very proud to announce that my first book just got released on The Pragmatic Programmers! The book is called “C++ Brain Teasers“, and is part of their Brain Teasers series. The book consists of 25 short C++ programs, and the point is to guess what the output is, and why the language works like … Continue reading I wrote a C++ book! →

Explaining how to hold on to something even when we don’t know its exact type, just what trait it implements. Series: Language basics, More syntax, Traits and generics, Building applications, Concurrency and parallelism, Trait objects, Async, Unsafe T…

I started to share some details about my latest book “Learn C++ by Example”, and gave overviews of the first few chapters previously.You can buy my book directly here: http://mng.bz/AdAQ – or just go look at the table of contents. You can als…

I started to share some details about my latest book “Learn C++ by Example”, and gave overviews of the first few chapters previously.You can buy my book directly here: http://mng.bz/AdAQ – or just go look at the table of contents. You can als…

Huge thanks to Micah Scott for hosting my videos on diode.zone until recently. My videos are moving to video.infosec.exchange/a/andybalaam – please update all your feeds. (Thanks to Jerry Bell for running that – please donate!) You can follow this blog…

Forgive me father, for it has been six months since my last gig.To be fair, my last gig was The Darkness and they played badly and we ended up next to some idiots in the crowd, so we left well before the end. A week or so before that was My Dying Bride…

I started to share some details about my latest book “Learn C++ by Example”, and gave an overview of the chapter three last time last time.You can buy my book directly here: http://mng.bz/AdAQ – or just go look at the table of contents. You can al…

I started to share some details about my latest book “Learn C++ by Example”, and gave an overview of the chapter three last time last time.You can buy my book directly here: http://mng.bz/AdAQ – or just go look at the table of contents. You can al…

CppQuiz.org is currently using C++ 17 for explanations and needs porting to C++ 23. I’d really appreciate your help! As a thank you, three contributors will get a copy of my upcoming book C++ Brain Teasers. How do I help? All the questions from the site have been exported to https://github.com/knatten/cppquiz23. Full instructions are in … Continue reading Help get CppQuiz to C++23 and win a book! →

I promised to share some details about my latest book “Learn C++ by Example”, and gave an overview of the first two chapters last time.You can buy my book directly here: http://mng.bz/AdAQ – or just go look at the table of contents. You can also buy i…

I promised to share some details about my latest book “Learn C++ by Example”, and gave an overview of the first two chapters last time.You can buy my book directly here: http://mng.bz/AdAQ – or just go look at the table of contents. You can also buy i…

I thought I’d share some details about my latest book “Learn C++ by Example”.You can buy it directly here: http://mng.bz/AdAQ – or just go look at the table of contents. You can also buy it from Amazon: https://amzn.to/4dMJ0aG People were asking for s…

I thought I’d share some details about my latest book “Learn C++ by Example”.You can buy it directly here: http://mng.bz/AdAQ – or just go look at the table of contents. You can also buy it from Amazon: https://amzn.to/4dMJ0aG People were asking for s…

I received a very kind email today from someone who had found my page Resources for year 6 teachers on coding and programming helpful, and wanted to suggest another link for me to add, about AI resources. I’m sure it was a helpful and useful link, but …

Implementing a simplified form of Mutex. Series: Language basics, More syntax, Traits and generics, Building applications, Concurrency and parallelism, Trait objects, Async, Unsafe This section (Concurrency and parallelism): 24: Parallelism, 25: Threa…

Searching across multiple documents in parallel with Rayon. Series: Language basics, More syntax, Traits and generics, Building applications, Concurrency and parallelism, Trait objects, Async, Unsafe This section (Concurrency and parallelism): 24: Par…

Update: I just discussed this with my son and I really want to emphasise: It does make a difference who is in power. The previous Labour government significantly improved primary education and many other public services. Don’t lose hope! Here are the c…

How to spawn threads and deal with lifetimes, how to send or share state across threads, and what Send and Sync mean. Series: Language basics, More syntax, Traits and generics, Building applications, Concurrency and parallelism, Trait objects, Async, …

What concurrency and parallelism are, a brief intro to Rayon, and a quick note on closures. Series: Language basics, More syntax, Traits and generics, Building applications, Concurrency and parallelism, Trait objects, Async, Unsafe This section (Concu…

Visual Lint 8.0.14.371 has been released. This is a maintenance update for Visual Lint 8.0, and includes the following changes: Updated the contents of the generated analysis command line for compatibility with CppCheck 2.14.0. Updated the PC-lint …

Visual Lint 8.0.14.371 has been released. This is a maintenance update for Visual Lint 8.0, and includes the following changes: Updated the contents of the generated analysis command line for compatibility with CppCheck 2.14.0. Updated the PC-lint …

Testing, benchmarking and optimising a small program that plays FizzBuzz. Series: Language basics, More syntax, Traits and generics, Building applications, Concurrency and parallelism, Trait objects, Async, Unsafe This section (Building applications):…

Building a command-line quiz application to bed in our knowledge about crates, modules and serialisation. All done using test-driven development. Series: Language basics, More syntax, Traits and generics, Building applications, Concurrency and paralle…

Going through an exercise on serialization with serde. Series: Language basics, More syntax, Traits and generics, Building applications, Concurrency and parallelism, Trait objects, Async, Unsafe This section (Building applications): 18: Dependencies, …

I’ve used a lot of existing Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs and have created several of my own. I see a lot of inconsistency, not just between REST APIs but often within a single REST API. I think most developers understand, at a high level…

I’ve used a lot of existing Representational State Transfer (REST) APIs and have created several of my own. I see a lot of inconsistency, not just between REST APIs but often within a single REST API. I think most developers understand, at a high level…

 I went to the ACCU conference this year. I was speaking on the last day, which I managed to put out of my mind for a while and went to several other sessions.We started with a keynote from Herb Sutter about safety in C++. He’s spoken an…

 I went to the ACCU conference this year. I was speaking on the last day, which I managed to put out of my mind for a while and went to several other sessions.We started with a keynote from Herb Sutter about safety in C++. He’s spoken an…

How to write unit tests in your Rust code, and some quick pointers on writing integration and benchmark tests. Series: Language basics, More syntax, Traits and generics, Building applications, Concurrency and parallelism, Trait objects, Async, Unsafe …

I have decided to stand for election to the Matrix Governing Board, which is a brand new body which advises and oversees the work of the Matrix Foundation. I will stand as an Individual Member, not representing a company or project. Contents: Purpose …

Tips and rules for writing good APIs that are easy for other people to use. Try to make them Unsurprising, Flexible, and Obvious. Series: Language basics, More syntax, Traits and generics, Building applications, Concurrency and parallelism, Trait obje…

How to describe details of your Rust project with a Cargo.toml file, and how to find and add dependencies (other people’s code). Series: Language basics, More syntax, Traits and generics, Building applications, Concurrency and parallelism, Trait objec…

Finishing off the exercises on Rust traits, designing a customised version of Vec. Series: Language basics, More syntax, Traits and generics, Building applications, Concurrency and parallelism, Trait objects, Async, Unsafe This section (Traits and gen…

James S. A. CoreyISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1841499932Abaddon’s Gate takes a while to get going. About half the book to get going. It’s all new character introductions and building. The second half is more exciting, but drawn out. Chrisjen Avasarala is totally …

James S. A. CoreyISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1841499932Abaddon’s Gate takes a while to get going. About half the book to get going. It’s all new character introductions and building. The second half is more exciting, but drawn out. Chrisjen Avasarala is totally …

DON’T DO THIS: the Signal app has the ability to make daily backups of your messages, and when you choose a folder to backup into, you can choose “Nextcloud” as the device, then choose a Nextcloud folder to back up to. Don’t do that. Although the above…

Going through some exercises on Rust traits, designing a customised version of Vec. Series: Language basics, More syntax, Traits and generics, Building applications, Concurrency and parallelism, Trait objects, Async, Unsafe This section (Traits and ge…

Rust has a feature where if you import two things from the same module you can abbreviate it like this: use mypkg::{MyStruct1, MyStruct2}; If you prefer, you can keep them separate, like this: use mypkg::MyStruct1; use mypkg::MyStruct2; I do prefer. St…

I gave a talk called “What is a Random number and why should I care?” a few times last year. It evolved each time, but I was fundamentally trying to decide whether I could define “randomness” properly. My first attempt was at ACCU. Unfortunately, …

I gave a talk called “What is a Random number and why should I care?” a few times last year. It evolved each time, but I was fundamentally trying to decide whether I could define “randomness” properly. My first attempt was at ACCU. Unfortunately, …

This time we tackle one of the most tricky areas for a new Rust programmer: lifetimes. The key point is that when we add lifetime bounds (‘a or similar) to a function signature, this is not to help Rust compile our function: it’s to help Rust understan…

A tour of some of the most interesting traits in the standard library including Add etc. to overload operators, Sized, Sync and Send for telling the compiler special things about your type, Clone and Copy for copying things, Into and From for convertin…

Machine VendettaAlastair ReynoldsISBN: ‎ 978-0316462846Machine Vendetta is the final Revelation Space novel we’re getting and the final part of the Dreyfus trilogy and it could have been a lot better. Unlike the previous book in the series, there was o…

Machine VendettaAlastair ReynoldsISBN: ‎ 978-0316462846Machine Vendetta is the final Revelation Space novel we’re getting and the final part of the Dreyfus trilogy and it could have been a lot better. Unlike the previous book in the series, there was o…

There is something wrong with the idea that git gives you confidence to delete. As so often this is from the perspective of the individual programmer. Sure, you can delete your code and you can retreive it. Well done you, but you are relyi…

There is something wrong with the idea that git gives you confidence to delete. As so often this is from the perspective of the individual programmer. Sure, you can delete your code and you can retreive it. Well done you, but you are relyi…

Following on from video 12, looking at how to add type information to traits, to make them flexible enough to describe generic code with different types, for example how to add a u32 to a u64 and return a u128, without defining a whole new trait for ev…

Explaining what a trait is, and how to use it. A trait is a bit like an Interface in Java or Go, or an Abstract Base Class in C++ or Python, but it can be used to define behaviour at compile-time as well as at run-time. We go through an example of why …

Happy Melati Day! On February 16th 2000 WilliamC made the first commit to Melati. https://github.com/Melati/Melati/commit/7a6fb6762cdbb835b4ff1aeb987bf1671cc598bd The name … Indonesia’s national flowers: the melati (small white…

Happy Melati Day! On February 16th 2000 WilliamC made the first commit to Melati. https://github.com/Melati/Melati/commit/7a6fb6762cdbb835b4ff1aeb987bf1671cc598bd The name … Indonesia’s national flowers: the melati (small white…

Going through some exercises on Rust ownership, references, slices and error handling. Series: Language basics, More syntax, Traits and generics, Building applications, Concurrency and parallelism, Trait objects, Async, Unsafe This section (More synta…

Update: as confirmed in the bug I logged, this was fixed in Firefox 123! See also: Keep your Indexed DB keys and values small if you want good performance! and Don’t store arrays of numbers in Indexed DB – use base64 instead. We had performance problem…

Following on from Keep your Indexed DB keys and values small if you want good performance!, here is another thing I’ve learned about Indexed DB performance (in July 2024): Update: Thanks to richvdh, we now know UInt8Array is much better than base64! If…

What a String is in Rust, and how they differ from &str. Strings are resizeable arrays of bytes that are guaranteed to be in UTF-8 format. &strs are references to chunks of bytes that are also guaranteed to be in UTF-8 format. If you want to le…

In our work recently on Element Web (specifically attempting to replace our encryption code with our cross-platform Rust implementation) we’ve noticed some strange behaviour with the performance of our Indexed DB queries. We’ve been aware of some slowd…

In the first post in this series I had thought about the need for a globally unique incrementable artifect id, in the next post I not only designed but tested a proposal for such a globally unique artifact id and how to change it. A t…

In the first post in this series I had thought about the need for a globally unique incrementable artifect id, in the next post I not only designed but tested a proposal for such a globally unique artifact id and how to change it. A t…

Explanation of some of the most commonly used types in Rust: Vecs, which store lists of items, Boxes that allow us to own things that we keep on the heap, and slices that are a way of referring to parts of Vecs or arrays without owning them. Series: L…

This time we discuss how to add methods to structs and enums, using impl blocks. Methods work similarly to other languages, but it might be a surprise that they can be defined inside separate blocks, and in fact they can be defined in multiple differen…

I proposed a new versioning scheme to yield a unique version string for each artifact in our highly modularised Maven java application. Currently we are running a classic SemVer semantic verioning system. The only shortcoming I can see wit…

I proposed a new versioning scheme to yield a unique version string for each artifact in our highly modularised Maven java application. Currently we are running a classic SemVer semantic verioning system. The only shortcoming I can see wit…

We learnt about enums and generics last time, which means we’re ready to talk about Result, which is a really nice way of handling errors in Rust, that allows you to be very explicit about what went wrong, but also with a very compact syntax using the …

A Storm of Swords, Part 2: Blood and Gold (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 3)by George R.R. MartinISBN-13: ‎ 978-0007447855At least George R. R. Martin is consistent. I didn’t really enjoy the second part of this book any more than the first. The Red Wedd…

A Storm of Swords, Part 2: Blood and Gold (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 3)by George R.R. MartinISBN-13: ‎ 978-0007447855At least George R. R. Martin is consistent. I didn’t really enjoy the second part of this book any more than the first. The Red Wedd…

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance  by  Robert PirsigISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0099786405 Zen and …

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance  by  Robert PirsigISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0099786405 Zen and …

Dear Ben Spencer, The behaviour of Hamas on 7th October and afterwards is inexcusable, and is rightly condemned by our government. I believe that the ongoing behaviour of the Israeli government in response to these attacks is inexcusable, and should be…

The whole Maven ecosystem, and more, follows the Semantic Versioning proposal from @mojombo who made a success of being right about most things. Even Oracle use it (no more ojdbc.jar for them). The problem Semantic Versioning addressed was th…

The whole Maven ecosystem, and more, follows the Semantic Versioning proposal from @mojombo who made a success of being right about most things. Even Oracle use it (no more ojdbc.jar for them). The problem Semantic Versioning addressed was th…

Santa Circles 0.3 is all new and shiny! santacircles.artificialworlds.net (It’s a secret-santa-style gift exchange web site.) Don’t worry, it looks exactly how it did last year, except there is a tiny “Forgot password?” link you can click if you need …

I’m currently rebuilding my main Windows machine after it had become close to unusable. Given that I upgraded it multiple times from Windows 7 all the way to Windows 11 without ever reinstalling the OS, this shouldn’t have come as a major s…

On my Windows machine, I’ve mostly moved from using separate virtual machine products like Hyper-V or Virtualbox to have access to a Linux machine to using WSL. The PC is dual-boot with a separate Linux install anyway, but sometimes I just want t…

Prelude To FoundationAsaac AsimovISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0008117481Although, as a child and teenager, I’ve heard an abridged audiobook many times and read Prelude to Foundation the first time more than two decades ago, I loved it more than I can describe and…