Tag Archives: visual studio

Comparing Memory is Still Tricky

Posted on October 31, 2012 by brucedawson

One of my “favorite” code-gen peculiarities in Visual Studio (VS) 2010 is its inconsistent handling of memcmp. VS 2010 had a really nice optimization that could generate faster and smaller code, but it only used the optimization if you lucked … Continue reading →

Posted in Performance, Programming, Visual Studio | Tagged , , , | 10 Comments

You’ve Got a Bug in Your Bug (Finder)

Posted on October 2, 2012 by brucedawson

All software has bugs, but there is something ironic about a crashing bug in the /analyze portion of Microsoft’s VC++ 2012 compiler. The investigation of this bug also shows yet another reason you should test your software using Microsoft’s Application … Continue reading →

Posted in Code analysis, Code Reliability, Investigative Reporting, Visual Studio | Tagged , , , , | 8 Comments

Xperf Wait Analysis–Finding Idle Time

Posted on May 5, 2012 by brucedawson

The Windows Performance Toolkit, also known as xperf, is a powerful (and free!) system-wide Windows profiler. In the past I’ve talked about using xperf to identify slowdowns in PowerPoint (tutorial version is here) by using xperf’s built-in sampling profiler, but … Continue reading →

Posted in AltDevBlogADay, Investigative Reporting, Performance, Programming, xperf | Tagged , , , , , , , | 46 Comments

They sure look equal…

Posted on February 11, 2012 by brucedawson

This is a special bonus extra post in my floating-point series, ranting about an issue that has been a problem for years. Some debuggers don’t display floats with enough precision.

Posted in Floating Point, Math, Programming | Tagged , , , , | 16 Comments

Visual C++ Code-gen Deficiencies

Posted on August 15, 2011 by brucedawson

Sensible programmers never (well, hardly ever) write assembly language anymore which means that we are at the mercy of our compilers and must trust them to wisely translate our high-level directives into machine code. Most compilers produce good code most … Continue reading →

Posted in Performance, Programming, Visual Studio | Tagged , | 7 Comments