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 and re-used at any point, while others have limited lifetimes and require special handling. Obtaining JNI objects through JNI APIs is, broadly speaking, fairly expensive, so it’s smart to persist those objects which will be re-used in multiple[...]

Pentago is a favorite board game of mine, which I used to play regularly with coworkers during lunch (and occasionally during not-lunch). The rules are very simple, and casual games can be played in just a few minutes, but it's deep enough to still be satisfying if you're willing to put some thought into your strategy. … Continue reading Pentago →

Pentago is a favorite board game of mine, which I used to play regularly with coworkers during lunch (and occasionally during not-lunch). The rules are very simple, and casual games can be played in just a few minutes, but it’s deep enough to still be satisfying if you’re willing to put some thought into your strategy. In 2009 I wrote a computer player for Pentago in C#, and even managed to cobble together Silverlight and Windows Phone UIs for it that aren’t terrible. The engine uses a negamax algorithm w[...]

The near-complete obviation of nulls is perhaps the most frequently- (and hilariously-) cited benefit of working in F#, as compared to C#. Nulls certainly still exist in F#, but as a practical matter it really is quite rare that they need to be considered explicitly within an all-F# codebase. It turns out this cuts both … Continue reading Null-checking considerations in F# - it's harder than you think →

The near-complete obviation of nulls is perhaps the most frequently- (and hilariously-) cited benefit of working in F#, as compared to C#. Nulls certainly still exist in F#, but as a practical matter it really is quite rare that they need to be considered explicitly within an all-F# codebase. It turns out this cuts both ways. On those infrequent occasions where one does need to check for nulls, F# actually makes it surprisingly difficult to do so safely and efficiently. In this post I’ve tried to aggre[...]