I am sick of non-deterministic memory management. So sick. This was the big promise of .NET wasn’t it, way back in the 00s? No more having to worry about reference counting, double-frees or leaks. Well all we’ve done is switched it for worrying about event handlers, garbage collector pauses and weak dictionaries.
If you don’t have to worry about memory in .NET applications, then why are there so many commercial tools for solving memory-related problems? I’m starting to yearn for the days of being able to put an instance on the stack for the length of a curly-bracketed scope, and knowing that after that, it’s gone. Continue reading Heisenmemory→
Screenshot of the finished lava lamp effectCatchy title, eh? This little experiment came about as I’ve been working on an iOS app where I decided to use an embedded OpenGL view, via GLKit, for a bit more flexibility than a plain-old UIView. This found me falling head-first down a rabbit-hole of OpenGL ES shaders. I ended up putting together a little demo that emulates a lava lamp using a nifty bit of GLSL code. Continue reading An iOS Lava Lamp using OpenGL ES shaders→
With the success of iOS games like Angry Birds and its flocks of imitators, there are lots of people looking at creating physics-based games, so I decided to try and create a simple demo using OpenGL ES and the Bullet physics engine. Continue reading Creating a physics-based OpenGL iOS app→
Nobody could have failed to notice the recent resurgence of interest in the C++ programming language. In particular, the recent Build conference was the most we’ve seen Microsoft talking about C++ for several years. Why has a language that’s been languishing in the “prehistoric irrelevance” category for so long suddenly come back into vogue? Continue reading C++: The oldest new kid on the block→