I stumbled on an idea for speeding up C++ builds the other day and it’s not something that I’ve considered before and it really does offer a considerable speed up so I think it may be worth considering in some situations. It has downsides which make it harder to use with my default style of code structuring but the increase in build speed is tempting… The idea is that of “Unity builds” which I discovered from an answer by Christoph Heindl on Stack Overflow about how to speed up Visual Studio builds.

Previously published This article was previously published on lhexapod.com as part of my journey of discovery into robotics and embedded assembly programming. A full index of these articles can be found here. I’ve been very busy with other things just recently and so I haven’t been able to spend much time on this project. Work has been busy as I’m working towards a new release of my code and my son Scott was born on 25th January.

My baby son Scott was born today, Jan 25th 2010, at 1.58am. He weighed 6lb 15oz and both he and his wonderful mother are doing fine.

I’m just finishing a batch of work that will be included in the 6.2 release of my IOCP based, high performance windows client and server framework and which improves the performance of the framework. There are two main improvements; the first is that the filtering API is now completely optional. There are now filtering and non-filtering base classes so that you only need to include filtering support if you need it.

As I mentioned a while back I’ve been looking at incorporating some simple performance gains in the framework by following the advice given over at the Windows Server Performance Team Blog. Specifically the advice from part three of the “Designing Applications for High Performance” series of postings. Whilst I’d done some quick and dirty tests with the FILE_SKIP_COMPLETION_PORT_ON_SUCCESS flag of SetFileCompletionNotificationModes() and all looked good I’m now working my way through my unit tests and adjusting them to work both when this option is enabled and when it’s not (completion dispatch changes somewhat when it’s enabled and my tests are invasive enough to notice this).

Previously published This article was previously published on lhexapod.com as part of my journey of discovery into robotics and embedded assembly programming. A full index of these articles can be found here. The simple servo sequencer that I’ve been working on has exposed a bug in the servo controller firmware. The bug is due to stack corruption during movement completion notifications, so it only happens if you use the ‘multi-move’ commands or the delay move command.

Previously published This article was previously published on lhexapod.com as part of my journey of discovery into robotics and embedded assembly programming. A full index of these articles can be found here. Once the servo controller code was feature complete I switched to looking at the hardware side of things and thinking about the next stage, the servo sequencing. From a hardware point of view I had several things to work on.

Once again, our Online Gaming Client has engaged us to continue developing the C++ side of their server system for them on an ongoing basis. This is to support new functionality and to aggressively improve existing performance.

I’ve complained about DevPartner Studio enough in the past (here, here, here, etc.) that I thought I should write a positive blog posting since my recent experiences have been very positive. Some time ago I reported a bug in the BoundsChecker part of the product which meant that it hung sometimes in multi-threaded code. I managed to get a reasonably straight forward reproduction and raised an issue with them. It took a while but this is now fixed in 9.

Charles Dickens said it best in A Tale of Two Cities; “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way”.