In my last post, I talked about resource management, and how RAII, Resource Acquisition is Initialization, is important in C++ because of the guarantees it provides. In this post, I’ll show how we can make the same guarantees in C. In C++, RAII provides a solution to resource management and the issues arising with exceptions.…
RAII, or Resource Acquisition is Initialization, is a programming idiom that originally came out of the C++ community. However, it’s a powerful approach that can be used in many languages, including old-fashioned C. In this blog post, I’ll introduce the RAII concept and examine the guarantees it provides in C++. A subsequent post will demonstrate…
If we interview you here at Cardinal Peak, we’re going to assume you’re competent to use Google, and we’ll give you the benefit of the doubt that you can look up answers to weird corner cases. What we really want to know is how deeply you understand how a computer works.
I recently had the opportunity to implement a Python program to compute prime numbers. After I was done, I wondered how the Python implementation compared to doing the same exact thing in C++, so I decided to do a comparison. First, the Python program. I computed prime numbers using the Sieve of Eratosthenes. (No, I…
In an earlier post, I suggested making all your memory allocations go through a single routine, and deletions through another. When you centralize allocation and deallocation like this, you gain a couple of benefits. First of all, you make the memory allocation more explicit, which will tend to make programmers more careful. Second, you can…
Previously, I wrote about my “golden rule” for reducing the prevalence of memory leaks in your code. One other easy way to prevent memory leaks is to actively seek them out during the development process, instead of waiting around for them to be reported to you as bugs. One good way to do this is…