During a recent project I encountered memory allocation failures in a LISP system, seemingly caused by poor garbage collector performance. More careful investigation revealed a more fundamental problem however, one that is even completely unrelated to the choice of language or runtime. System Outline Without going into unnecessary detail, I should give a brief overview of the system I have been working on. It is an import system for a search engine; in other words, it trawls large datasets that it downloads from an object store, processes those datasets, and uploads certain data in the form of XML documents to a search engine.

HTTP/2 is a symptom of a disease; it is a terribly ill conceived deterioration of the otherwise pretty good HTTP/1.1 protocol. Most really terrible ideas (like a computer in your toaster or a 3D television) usually linger for a while and then die and leave us alone. Of course I was expecting for HTTP/2 to go this route, but yesterday was a shocker: Looking at integrating with Apple’s PSN (Push Notification Service) API, it became apparent they only support HTTP/2 access.

It continues to amaze me when I look at other peoples code, how many good developers think in signed integers. This is a short example of such code and a walk-through of why it is mis-guided. Signedness in the world of computers Almost nothing in the world of computers is signed; you cannot send a negative number of bytes, you cannot have a negative amount of memory, you cannot put a negative number of elements in a vector and so on and so forth.

This is a re-formatting of my original post from 2004; the content is kept original, typos included, only the formatting has been updated. Please understand that this was written in 2004 - the article no longer represents “modern C++” nor does it represent the current state of compilers or libraries. Introduction About once a year, the “C versus C++” (and commonly “versus just about any other language imaginable”) discussion pops up on the Beowulf mailing list.