Category Archives: Erlang

Reference strepr implementation

Posted on 2013/07/03 by niemeyer

In an effort to polish the recently released draft of the strepr v1 specification, I’ve spent the last couple of days in a Go reference implementation. The implemented algorithm is relatively simple, efficient, and consumes a conservative amount of memory. … Continue reading →

Posted in Design, Erlang, Go, Java, Lua, MongoDB, Perl, Project, Python, Ruby, Security, Snippet | 2 Comments

IEEE-754 brain teaser

Posted on 2013/06/27 by niemeyer

Here is a small programming brain teaser for the weekend: Assume uf is an unsigned integer with 64 bits that holds the IEEE-754 representation for a binary floating point number of that size. The questions are:

Posted in C/C++, Erlang, Go, Haskell, Java, Math, Perl, Puzzle, Python, Ruby, Snippet | 7 Comments

strepr v1 (draft2)

Posted on 2013/06/25 by niemeyer

Note: This is a candidate version of the specification. This note will be removed once v1 is closed, and any changes will be described at the end. Please get in touch if you’re implementing it. Contents Introduction Supported values Representation … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Article, C/C++, Cloud, Design, Erlang, Go, Haskell, Java, Lua, Math, MongoDB, Python, Ruby, Security | 14 Comments

Death of goroutines under control

Posted on 2011/10/09 by niemeyer

Certainly one of the reasons why many people are attracted to the Go language is its first-class concurrency aspects. Features like communication channels, lightweight processes (goroutines), and proper scheduling of these are not only native to the language but are … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Design, Erlang, Go, Project, Snippet, Test | 8 Comments

Efficient algorithm for expanding circular buffers

Posted on 2010/12/23 by niemeyer

Circular buffers are based on an algorithm well known by any developer who’s got past the “Hello world!” days. They offer a number of key characteristics with wide applicability such as constant and efficient memory use, efficient FIFO semantics, etc. … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Article, C/C++, Erlang, Go, Haskell, Java, Lua, Perl, Python, Ruby, Snippet | 4 Comments

Introducing The Hacking Sandbox

Posted on 2010/09/25 by niemeyer

When I started programming in Python long ago, one of the features which really hooked me up was the quality interactive interpreter offered with the language implementation. It was (and still is) a fantastic way to experiment with syntax, semantics, … Continue reading →

Posted in C/C++, Erlang, Go, Haskell, Java, Lua, Perl, Ruby | 10 Comments

Python has a GIL, and lots of complainers

Posted on 2010/07/09 by niemeyer

I’ve just read a post by Brett Cannon where, basically, he complains about complainers. If you don’t know who Brett is, you’re probably not a heavy Python user. Brett is a very important Python core developer which has been around … Continue reading →

Posted in Erlang, Go, Python | 36 Comments

Integrating IRC with LDAP and two-way SMSing

Posted on 2010/06/19 by niemeyer

A bit of history I don’t know exactly why, but I’ve always enjoyed IRC bots. Perhaps it’s the fact that it emulates a person in an easy-to-program way, or maybe it’s about having a flexible and shared “command line” tool, … Continue reading →

Posted in Architecture, Cloud, Erlang, Mobile, Project, Python | 1 Comment