After upgrading to Visual Studio 2013 I noticed that find-in-files had a problem when searching directories. The VS IDE would repeatedly hang, rendering it completely useless for the duration of the search. I filed a bug, complete with ETW traces and a detailed analysis of what was going on.
This is a success story. Microsoft has now released Visual Studio 2013 Update 2 RC which fixes the problem.
I recently discovered that Microsoft’s VC++ compiler loads mshtml.dll – also known as Internet Explorer. The compiler does this whenever the /analyze option (requesting static code analysis) is used. I’m no compiler architecture expert, but a compiler that loads Internet Explorer seems peculiar.
This isn’t just a theoretical concern either. I discovered this while investigating why too much static-analysis parallelism causes my machine to become unresponsive for many minutes at a time, and the mshtml window appears to be the part of the cause.
The free lunch is over and our CPUs are not getting any faster so if you want faster builds then you have to do parallel builds. Visual Studio supports parallel compilation but it is poorly understood and often not even enabled.
I want to show how, on a humble four-core laptop, enabling parallel compilation can give an actual four-times build speed improvement. I will also show how to avoid some of the easy mistakes that can significantly reduce VC++ compile parallelism and throughput. And, as a geeky side-effect, I’ll explain some details of how VC++’s parallel compilation works.
Plus, pretty pictures.
My grandfather is 94 years old. He is sound of mind and body and that is probably because he gets more exercise than most people in their twenties. He spends about forty five minutes each morning doing these exercises – not because he enjoys them but because he believes that they are important. Doing these exercises is no guarantee that you will stay healthy, but I’m sure it improves your odds.
With his permission I have included his exercise plan below, written up four years ago and still followed today.
Aside: my grandfather wrote a book about his adventures, including his escape from a Japanese POW camp through China. Contact me if you’re interested in purchasing a copy.
I was looking at an xperf (ETW) trace recently and needed to know who had started a particular process. The parent process ID was stored in the trace so I could find its parent, and its parent’s parent, and so on, but doing this for many generations in WPA is tedious.
Luckily the 8.1 version of the Windows Performance Toolkit has a tool for exporting arbitrary data, so I used that and a bit of Python to write a tool that would create a process tree for an ETW trace.
A few months ago I saw a blog post touting fancy new SSE3 functions for implementing vector floor, ceil, and round functions. There was the inevitable proud proclaiming of impressive performance and correctness. However the ceil function gave the wrong answer for many numbers it was supposed to handle, including odd-ball numbers like ‘one’.
The floor and round functions were similarly flawed. The reddit discussion of these problems then discussed two other sets of vector math functions. Both of them were similarly buggy.
Fixed versions of some of these functions were produced, and they are greatly improved, but some of them still have bugs.
Floating-point math is hard, but testing these functions is trivial, and fast. Just do it.
