C++ Coroutines Do Not Spark Joy
C++20 added minimal support for coroutines. I think they’re done in a way that really doesn’t fit into C++, mostly because they don’t follow the zero-overhead principle. Calling a coroutine can be...
View ArticleAutomated Game AI Testing
In 2018 I wrote an article for the book “Game AI Pro 4” called “Automated AI Testing: Simple tests will save you time.” The book has since been canceled, but the article is now available online on the...
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Reasons why Babies Cry in the First Three Months, How to Tell The Cries...
I have twin daughters that just turned three months old. I decided to write up the list that I wish I had before they were born. Just reasons why they cry, how to tell the cries apart, and what to do...
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Sudoku Variants as Playful Proof Practice
Doing mathematical proofs is kinda fun. Unfortunately they only make you do a few fun ones in school, then they get frustrating and tedious. So I have long been looking for a game that is about doing...
View ArticleFinding the “Second Bug” in glibc’s Condition Variable
I continue to have no time for big programming projects, so here is a short blog post. Two years ago I looked into a bug in the glibc implementation of condition variables: Sometimes...
View ArticleFine-grained Locking with Two-Bit Mutexes
Lets say you want to have a mutex for every item in a list with 10k elements. It feels a bit wasteful to use a std::mutex for each of those elements. In Linux std::mutex is 40 bytes, in Windows it’s...
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Beautiful Branchless Binary Search
I read a blog post by Alex Muscar, “Beautiful Binary Search in D“. It describes a binary search called “Shar’s algorithm”. I’d never heard of it and it’s impossible to google, but looking at the...
View ArticleTwo Kids Put Me on a Two Sleep Schedule
I’m writing this at 2am, having already slept from 9pm to 1am. I will sleep again from 4am to 7am. This is apparently called “biphasic sleep”, which I first heard about in the 2022 article The...
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Transform Matrices are Great and You Should Understand Them
The title of this blog post is obvious for any game programmer, but I notice that people outside of games often write clumsy code because they don’t know how transform matrices work. Especially when...
View ArticleHow I use LLMs to program
Studies have shown that LLMs help novice programmers more than experienced programmers. This matches my experience. At work I see that interns or new hires have some LLM window open almost all the...
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