Today we caught up with Andrei Alexandrescu for a “10 Question” interview. He is a Romanian born research engineer at Facebook living in the US, you can contact him on his website erdani.com or @incomputable.We will talk about some of the juicy stuff that going on at Facebook, so let’s get started.Hello Andrei, welcome on Server-Side Magazine.1. Tell us a little bit about yourself. Who are you? Where and what do you work?Who am I? Ah, the coffee breath of one talking about himself. Well let me try. I’m a hacker living in the US, originally from Romania. In 2001 I wrot...

Like most programmers, I was attracted to Scheme by the promise that it would make me a better programmer. I came to appreciate the functional style, but swapped to Haskell, a more developed language with a rapidly developing standard library. Unfortunately, for me, Haskell can’t yet replace C++ on a day to day basis, so I reluctantly spend my days tapping away at C++. So, were the promises true? has functional programming made me a better programmer?Better is a tough question, I have no benchmarks for the quality of my code before and after Haskell, but it has certainly changed my c...

Back in October 2011, Ted Dziuba infamously said that Node.js is Cancer.  A provocative title to a provocative article.  The only thing it didn’t really provoke in the commentary was much thought ;)  Zing.My interpretation of the article is that Ted holds up the classic blocking-IO process-per-request (or  thread per request; same difference) model as superior.  Yet we all remember where the blocking-IO forking model got Apache in the early days.  So I’m a tad uncomfortable with his solution from the good old days.  But fundamentally you ca...

C++? Why on Earth?C++ seems like one of the least likely languages to write a web application in.C++ is associated with complexity, both with language design and the need tomanually manage memory. Programming in C++ unleashes a whole class of bugsassociated with memory corruption and memory allocation. This is a trade off forgiving more power to the developer along generally being much faster thanequivalent programs in languages such as Python or Ruby.Real-time Web as a Use CaseMaking a hard real-time application1 onthe web is a futile task. Unpredictable network latencies make this animpossib...

I had an interesting conversation with a friend the other day. She wanted to try putting together a weekend "hackathon" just to see what we could build. It would be one of those fun things where we just start tinkering and see what comes out of it.Somehow, this conversation got to the topic of libraries, programming languages, and frameworks. Then it got a little weird.I guess the current "shiny" thing is still more-or-less Ruby, and particularly when used with Rails. Oh, I suppose there's also the whole node thing, in which you write things in Javascript and run them server-side with v8. ...

After two months of Sol Trader development in Ruby, I took a difficult decision last Wednesday morning: I’ve decided to rewrite the game code from scratch in C++. Let me explain my reasons. If you'd like to receive announcements about Sol Trader or be part of the beta program, sign up at soltrader.net.Why I did itSlow frames: When working with Ruby, I use the excellent Gosu library to do all my game specific coding. This initially worked great, but occasionally I’d just get slow frames coming up. My game is timed to run at 60 frames per second, which means that each frame should...

It is Christmas over here, and it is time of giving. So I decided to give something back to the community. I guess this is as old as web programming itself. Trying to create C++ web framework. If you search on the web, you can find dozen of guys that had exactly the same idea. I am not different. For one of the previous projects(discontinued now) I created simple web framework in C++. If you like to hack in C++, here it is. Code is provided as-is, as part of larger application. You can extract framework code itself, use only some portions of it, or use whole application, if you like. I do not ...

This morning Miroslav Bajtoš asked “Why do C++ folks make things so complicated?” in response to my article on regular expressions in C++. Other people asked similar questions yesterday.My response has two parts:Why I believe C++ libraries are often complicated.Why I don’t think it has to be that way.Why would someone be using C++ in the first place? Most likely because they need performance or fine-grained control that they cannot get somewhere else. A Ruby programmer, for example, can make a design decision that makes code 10% slower but much easier to use. “Hey, ...