sparcie

Tag: software-development

  • Code Optimisation

    Recently I started reading a book about code optimisation that focuses on the x86 architecture and assembly language. The book is called Graphics Programming Black book and is written by Michael Abrash who is well known for his work writing technical articles and coding on games such as Doom and…

  • Memory Allocation – Heap and Stack

    A question I recently saw online was about how memory is allocated and used within the Java programming language. There was a little confusion about what the heap and stack are. Both the stack and heap are common to many languages such as pascal, C, and many more. Stack space…

  • The C/C++ programming language

    C and it’s derivative C++are perhaps both the most popular programming languages currently in use. C has it’s root in the early 1970’s in AT&T’s Bell Labs, it quickly became used for low level programming of kernels, and many of the early Unix operating systems were written with it. C++…

  • Using the inline assembler in Pascal

    I’ve been asked recently how you go about adding assembly instructions in old pascal program using the compilers inline facility. Assembly is important if you want to write your own hardware handling routines, or need to do something as fast as possible. It can be difficult writing assembly code, but…

  • The Java Programming language

    The first language I learned at university was Java. Java is a high level object-oriented language, it is used in web pages in the form of applets. Some features of Java were very unique at the time it was created. The compiler does not generate native code, but rather generates…

  • Some Interesting articles…

    In doing some reading around the internet about processors I recently read an article which explains the design of modern microprocessors in a very nice and easy to understand way. You can find it here. Also of interest from the same author is a short piece about exception handling that…

  • Turbo Pascal for DOS

    When I was a teenager I mostly wrote programs using gwbasic or qbasic. Around the time when I was about 15 or 16, my computer studies teacher gave me a copy of Borland turbo pascal 6 to try out and learn. It was a much different language to BASIC, and…

  • Profiling an Android Application

    As you may or may not know, I have been writing an app for the Android platform using OpenGL. Anyone writing for OpenGL on the Android platform should know that it is important to make sure your code is memory efficient, and most importantly fast. In order to achieve this…

  • OpenGL on Android tips

    I’ve been working on an 2d rendering engine for OpenGL on the Android platform using the standard Java API. In my ramblings around the internet there seems to be a misunderstanding about how some portions of the API were intended to be used. In particular the use of vertex, texture…