As part of the small minority of devs at my company who primarily run Windows, I’m accustomed to working around occasional Unix-specific behaviors in our build and deployment systems. Cygwin makes most stuff just work, I can fix simple incompatibilities myself, and as a last resort I can always boot into OSX for a while if needed. One oddity that took me quite some time to diagnose, though, was Git’s strange behavior when dealing with files in our repo whose names contained a colon. What happens when [...]

This blog started on wordpress.com back in February of 2012, then in November 2013 I moved it to a hosted WordPress.org site here at latkin.org. WordPress is quite nice, but it seemed like it was a bit heavyweight given my very basic needs. I’ve wanted to slim down the site and get more hands-on for a while, now. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been migrating the entire blog to the Hugo static site generator. I’m pleased to announce that the migration is complete! Why Hugo? No particular reason. I happe[...]

It's pretty straightforward to do basic benchmarking of a single, self-contained piece of code in .NET. You just make a Stopwatch sandwich (let sw = Stopwatch.StartNew(); <code goes here>; sw.Stop()), then read off the elapsed time from the Stopwatch. What about measuring the throughput of a data pipeline? In this case one is less interested in … Continue reading Benchmarking IEnumerables in F# - Seq.timed →

It’s pretty straightforward to do basic benchmarking of a single, self-contained piece of code in .NET. You just make a Stopwatch sandwich (let sw = Stopwatch.StartNew(); <code goes here>; sw.Stop()), then read off the elapsed time from the Stopwatch. What about measuring the throughput of a data pipeline? In this case one is less interested in timing a single block of code from start to finish, and more interested in bulk metrics like computations/sec or milliseconds/item. Oftentimes such pipelines are[...]

I've recently had reason to do a bit of work with JNI .  Throughout the course of this work I had to do quite a lot of Googling in order to figure out how to properly manage the caching of various JNI objects used by my C++ code. Some JNI objects can be safely cached … Continue reading JNI object lifetimes - quick reference →