A few days ago one of my build machines started to have unexpected test failures during regular integration builds of one of my client’s codebases. My other build machines ran the tests fine and the failures were intermittent and spread over a worryingly large array of tests.
TL;DR
Don’t use CLOCK_REALTIME to measure wait or delay times as it can be changed and the time reported can move unexpectedly; absolute timeouts do not play nicely with this clock.
I have been using a home-grown continuous integration system based on a hacked version of CruiseControl.Net since 2007. Whilst it’s not perfect, it works, and I have quite a bit of custom tooling that builds configurations for it for various client projects and builds of various versions of The Server Framework.
TL;DR
By exporting the configuration of Visual Studio as a vsconfig file you can create a custom installation with specific tools in a stand-alone directory structure that can be referenced by build tools, and you can then link specific revisions of code to specific versions of Visual Studio so that they ‘always build’, even if the installed compiler is incompatible.
There’s a lot of noise about how “Joe Biden’s government wants you to move away from using C++”. This is as a result of the US government releasing a report, Back to the building blocks: A path toward secure and measurable software which suggests:
Uncle Sam says "no!"
“Memory safety vulnerabilities are a class of vulnerability affecting how memory can be accessed, written, allocated, or deallocated in unintended ways. Experts have identified a few programming languages that both lack traits associated with memory safety and also have high proliferation across critical systems, such as C and C++.
When your machine has multiple NUMA nodes it’s often useful to restrict a process to using just one for performance reasons. It’s sometimes hard to fully utilize multiple NUMA nodes and, if you get it wrong, it can cost in performance as the nodes need to keep their caches consistent and potentially access memory over a slower link than the memory that is closer to the node, these things can be relatively expensive.
