Spinlock and mutex are two important concepts in multithreading programs. They are used to lock some shared resource to prevent concurrent access which may affect data consistency. But they do have differences, what are the differences? when should we use spinlock instead of mutex?The TheoryIn theory, when a thread tries to lock a mutex and it does not succeed, because the mutex is already locked, it will go to sleep, immediately allowing another thread to run. It will continue to sleep until being woken up, which will be the case once the mutex is being unlocked by whatever thread was holding...

When we are coding we may often see some encoding specifications in our source codes such as UTF-8,GB2312. Do you know what these encoding mean and why we need them? In this post, Julián Solórzano will introduce the most widely used encoding specification around the world accomodating all different character sets in the world.UTF-8 is a method for encoding Unicode characters using 8-bit sequences. Unicode is a standard for representing a great variety of characters from many languages.Something like 40 years ago, the standard for information encoding ASCII was created. ASCII...

Different programming are similar in helping people build staff work as people want them to. But they all have their own features which differentiate them from other programming languages. The language type may be different, for example Java is OOP, some may have different syntax. A programming motto usually can best describe the characteristic of the programming language. For example, "Write once Run everywhere" for Java.But today we are going to take a look at "unofficial mottos" about some programming languages which can describe programming languages from other perspective.C -- C combines ...

Here are a few things you can consider. These are by no means the only way to go about hackathons, just what's worked for me.ProjectI strongly strongly recommend doing something you haven't done before. Even if you're going into a hackathon with the intention of winning, trying something new is always fun and will keep you engaged throughout the event. Jump into mobile development, try hardware hacking, write a compiler, whatever; it's always fun to try out new things.Sticking to things you're comfortable with IMO limits your creativity.DesignStrike a balance. This is a hackathon, judges aren'...

Many programmers may have experience in participating different kinds of coding competition while they are in college. Many of them are hired by top IT companies for their excellent performance during these kinds of coding competitions. There are some famous competitions organized by IT companies such as Google Code Jam, Facebook hackathons etc. Coding competitions are places where programmers can show their talents in programming and the skills they have. Usually programmers will solve some toughest problems in programming or in real life, lots of them are algorithm and math related. It has i...

System programming is the practice of writing system software. System software lives at a low level, interfacing directly with the kernel and core system libraries. Your shell and your text editor, your compiler and your debugger, your core utilities and system daemons are all system software. But so are the network server, the web server, and the database. These components are entirely system software, primarily if not exclusively interfacing with the kernel and the C library.But nowadays more and more programming work are about high level product designs. Application programming designs such...

We may frequently see stack when we read programming books. But many times we may be confused about the different meanings of it. This term actually has three common meanings. Here we explain the three different meanings of Stack in programming.1. Data structureThe first meaning of Stack defines a method for storing data. Its feature is LIFO9Last In First Out). In this data structure, data are accumulated level by level. The data last put in is added at the top of the stack. When using the data, the top one is first popped out from the stack.There are usually some methods related to this data ...

Programming is cool. But behind the scenes it's also difficult for many people. Many people are defeated at the early stage of learning programming. When you are not so familiar with programming, you may find you don't know where to start and what to start with first and where to apply the knowledge. Once you go though the tough period of the learning phase, you will find a whole new world. Below are some advice which can help you improve your programming skills quickly.Write more code.  The best thing to learn something quickly is practicing. You should spend more of your time on buildin...