Who
Aaron Ballman is a senior software engineer for a leading colorimetric software company. He has over a decade of experience writing cross-platform frameworks in C/C++, compiler & language design, and software engineering best practices.
In case you can't figure it out easily enough, the views expressed here are my personal views and not the views of my employer, my past employers, my future employers or some random person on the street. Please yell only at me if you disagree with what you read.
Category Archives: C/C++
MSVC Pointer Type Attributes
One of the lesser-known features of Visual Studio’s C/C++ compiler are the pointer type attributes __ptr32 and __ptr64. More information about them can be found on MSDN. These pointer type attributes are used to control the visible size and behavior … Continue reading
Posted in C/C++, Win32
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How Variable Argument Lists Work in C
Variable argument lists are very arcane in the world of C. You’ll see them expressed in function signatures as … at the end of the parameter list, but you may not understand how they work or what they do.
Value Types in C++11
You may have heard these terms used for various programming languages before, but I wanted to discuss them in a bit more detail since they’re a fairly fundamental concept in compilers that spill over into the way you use the … Continue reading
Now, With More Tidbits!
Sorry about the distinct lack of content lately, but I’ve been busy putting together a new training initiative for my day job. This initiative involves sending weekly snippets of information on C and C++ to many of our developers. The … Continue reading
Posted in C/C++
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Theory and Reality
One thing which I am pretty religious about is the placement of ++ and — in an expression. You have two options for where it can go. If it goes before the operand, it’s a pre-increment/decrement. If it goes after … Continue reading
Describing the MSVC ABI for Structure Return Types
An ABI is an “application binary interface”, which is basically a contract between pieces of executable code on how to behave. The ABI dictates things like how parameters are passed, where return values go, how to create and destroy stack … Continue reading
Varargs? More like Arghargs!
This was a silly mistake on my part, but one which took me several hours to track down. In retrospect, I had everything at my disposal to tell me exactly what the problem was, I just didn’t notice it. It … Continue reading
Posted in C/C++
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Worst Compiler Abuse Ever
I am pretty sure this qualifies as the worst abuse of a compiler I can think of. Note, I am not recommending you use this in production code, lest you wish to be set on fire by those who have … Continue reading
Posted in C/C++
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I Learned Something New About New
In my last post, I had mentioned that I found a phenomenon that made no sense to me. It had to do with initializing the members of a structure when calling new. Since I can’t let sleeping dogs lie, I … Continue reading
Tail Calls
A tail call is a specific pattern of source code where the last instruction executed in a method is another function call. For instance: In this code, the call to last is considered a tail call because there are no … Continue reading
