Programming — Table Of Contents

Ryan Fleury
Jan 27, 2023

Multi-Threading & Mutation

Ryan Fleury
·
Mar 12
Multi-Threading & Mutation

On day one, to even begin programming anything, programmers must understand how to write text files, and use an interpreter, or compiler, or assembler, to turn them into executing programs. Soon after, they must roughly understand what memory is, and how to use addresses and pointers (even if they’re working in various high level languages in which thos…

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The Easiest Way To Handle Errors Is To Not Have Them

Ryan Fleury
·
December 29, 2023
The Easiest Way To Handle Errors Is To Not Have Them

Programmers are taught early to spend a great deal of time considering “errors”, and how to “handle” them. But one of the most important programming lessons I’ve learned over the past several years is to dismiss the idea that errors are special. At the bottom, the computer is a computer. It’s a data transformation machine. An error case is simply a

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Factorio, Mutation, & Lossiness

Ryan Fleury
·
July 26, 2023
Factorio, Mutation, & Lossiness

I heard about Factorio not long after its 2016 release. Within the span of a few months, several friends of mine developed a new addiction—it wasn’t to any kind of physical substance, but it might as well have been. As such, I avoided playing it at first; I wanted to give it a try when I knew I had a few weeks of time off, and such periods become exceed…

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The Function Is A Lie

Ryan Fleury
·
May 10, 2023
The Function Is A Lie

I recently mentioned, in conversation, a technique I regularly use for user interface animation, which I’ve written about before. It’s not applicable for all animation curves in all scenarios, but it tightly fits design goals for a user interface, it’s simple, it’s low-cost to implement, and it produces robust animation behavior which gracefully adapts to mid-animation changes. Importantly, this technique introduces no new

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The Codepath Combinatoric Explosion

Ryan Fleury
·
April 12, 2023
The Codepath Combinatoric Explosion

I defined a codepath as “a sequential list of instructions which terminates”. One interesting detail of that definition is that it entirely ignores control flow—there is no way to form loops or conditionals in a codepath (given that definition), because an executor must necessarily execute instructions

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Main Loops, Refresh Rates, and Determinism

Ryan Fleury
·
March 31, 2023
Main Loops, Refresh Rates, and Determinism

One of the first lessons in game, simulation, and application programming is on the “main loop”: for(B32 should_quit = 0; should_quit == 0;) { GatherInputs(); // get data encoding input from user Update(); // simulate, using new inputs Draw(); // draw state of simulation on screen }

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A Taxonomy Of Computation Shapes

Ryan Fleury
·
February 17, 2023
A Taxonomy Of Computation Shapes

Many learn to program because they’re fascinated by—and talented at solving—the tricky logic puzzles involved. But those puzzles weren’t my top priority when I started programming. I can appreciate a good puzzle, but I got into programming because, originally, I wanted to build my own video games. I still loved

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Emergence and Composition

Ryan Fleury
·
December 1, 2022
Emergence and Composition

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things. —Phil Karlton Naming is often called one of the most difficult problems in programming. Surely, at least once during a programming conference of your choice, and almost always by someone who has done a lot of programming.

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In Defense Of Linked Lists

Ryan Fleury
·
November 1, 2022
In Defense Of Linked Lists

Learning the basics of data structures is a rite of passage for new programmers. On their first day doing so, chances are they’ll encounter the idea of a “node”, and the idea of links between nodes. Both of these ideas can be used to organize data in innumerable ways.

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You Get What You Measure

Ryan Fleury
·
October 7, 2022
You Get What You Measure

I’ve noticed an unfortunate development habit of mine. I’m not the only one, so chances are if you’ve avoided this habit yourself, you’ve at least seen it elsewhere. This habit is over-secrecy in a project’s development. “Nobody can see it until it’s

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Untangling Lifetimes: The Arena Allocator

Ryan Fleury
·
September 23, 2022
Untangling Lifetimes: The Arena Allocator

In every instance when I’ve said that I prefer to write my software in C, the response is—normally—raised eyebrows. Several dominant memes in the programming world make my position unpopular, and thus uncommon to find. I regularly hear, “why would you write new code in an unsafe systems language?”, “performance isn’t everything!”, and perhaps the most c…

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Table-Driven Code Generation

Ryan Fleury
·
July 30, 2022
Table-Driven Code Generation

Anyone who has written C has been in the situation—you write an enum, and sooner or later, you’d like to associate values of that enum with strings. You might want to log a value to plaintext in a human-readable form, or you might want to display the value in a user interface.

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