Bill Karwin (twitter, new blog, old blog, Amazon) is famous for much work in the SQL database community, including InterBase/Firebird, mySQL, Oracle and many more.
column major order (not only used in Fortran and other science centric languages, but also in the shading languages GLSL and HLSL that can be used in FireMonkey)
row major order (used in most other languages, for instance Delphi, C, etc)
A very important aspect is the order of for optimized loops. For column major order, the optimum is inside out (as the inner arrays/records are in consecutive memory locations), but for row major order, it is the exact inverse.
One of the consequences is that in Fortran it is a very fast operation to pass an array of inner fields as parameter to a method.
I had this error in a really complicated unit that I tried to backport from Delphi XE2 to Delphi 2007 (as there was some non-unicode compliant app that needed this).
Recently I was asked to investigate a performance problem with a certain .NET application.
The first error I got when getting the app to build in Visual Studio 2010, and then run it was like this:
System.ComponentModel.InvalidAsynchronousStateException was caught
Message=An error occurred invoking the method. The destination thread no longer exists.
Source=System.Windows.Forms
StackTrace:
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.WaitForWaitHandle(WaitHandle waitHandle)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.MarshaledInvoke(Control caller, Delegate method, Object[] args, Boolean synchronous)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.Invoke(Delegate method, Object[] args)
at UI.Splash.SetStatus(String status) in C:\...\Splash.cs:line 395
at UI.Menu.Main() in C:\...\Menu.cs:line 4275
InnerException:
Someone built their own splash logic with multi-threading.
That sounds like a Delphi link too, but the subtitle “‘Ways to get into avoidable trouble with threads, V1.2′” hints the essence: it is a post that describes in an environment-agnostic way how to avoid multi-threading problems.
Recommended reading!
Anyway: Building multi-threaded code is hard. Even harder fleshing out all the corner cases and potential error conditions.
No matter what kind of programming environment: If you have not done lots of multi-threaded programming, then please don’t do it yourself: go ask someone that does know how to do it. Or better, try to avoid it.
I try to let libraries to the handling of multi-threading for me, if I use multi-threading at all, as others are far better at this than I am.
In the mid 80s, when programming in UCSD Pascal and Turbo Pascal, I learned that Pascal has (. and .) digraphs that translate into [ and ], similar to the (* and *) digraphs that translate to { and }.
Back then (I was in my teens, there was no internet yet and school library had nothing on programming) I thought these were because keyboards like those of the Apple ][ plus couldn’t emit [ and ], but I was wrong: it was in fact the Hollerith Card Code that could not represent these characters.
For a development tools company, getting your tools to work on a new platform is hard, and in this case it seems exceptionally hard.
I’m really looking forward to see what kind of cool tools come out of this, as the current developemt platform choices (Xcode or MonoTouch) can really use more competition to make it easier for us developers.
![Apple ][ plus keyboard](https://i0.wp.com/farm9.staticflickr.com/8018/7460975930_9301da62e4_n.jpg "Apple ][ plus keyboard")
The Wiert Corner - irregular stream of stuff 