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  How big are PHP arrays (and values) really? (Hint: BIG!)

Upfront I want to thank Johannes and Tyrael for their help in finding some of the more hidden memory usage. In this post I want to investigate the memory usage of PHP arrays (and values in general) using the following script as an example, which creates 100000 unique integer array elements and measures the resulting memory usage: <?php $startMemory = memory_get_usage(); $array = range(1, 100000); echo memory_get_usage() - $startMemory, ' bytes'; How much would you expect it to ...

   PHP,Array,Memory occupation,Garbage collection     2011-12-16 10:06:04

  Function Pointers in C are Underrated

The function pointer in C is, in my opinion, one of the most ignored gems of the language. It’s the kind of feature you rarely need, and then suddenly, one day, you find yourself in dire need of it, as evidenced by the real-life use-case below. If you don’t know what a function pointer is in the first place, here’s the meat of it: it gives you the ability to pass a function around like a normal variable. If you know Python / Ruby / Lisp, you might know it by the name...

   C,Pointer,Analysis     2012-03-24 05:23:09

  Popular Golang JSON libraries evaluation

JSON (Javascript Object Notation), a prevailing data exchange format, is widely used in various platforms and languages. Golang, of course, will never miss the support for JSON. And with its own standard library, such as those interfaces like the REST API from the API Service in Kubernetes, it can easily process JSON. Although Go’s library works great, we can still seek those open-source JSON libs in Github to maximize our efficiency. Then the features, performance, applicability of these ...

   FASTJSON,JSON LIB,JSON LIB COMPARISON,GO-JSON     2021-12-11 23:13:23

  Python internals: adding a new statement to Python

This article is an attempt to better understand how the front-end of Python works. Just reading documentation and source code may be a bit boring, so I’m taking a hands-on approach here: I’m going to add an until statement to Python. All the coding for this article was done against the cutting-edge Py3k branch in the Python Mercurial repository mirror. The until statement Some languages, like Ruby, have an until statement, which is the complement to while (until num == 0 is equi...

   Python,New statement,Research,Addition     2012-03-12 07:32:24

  Create namespace in JavaScript

A namespace (sometimes also called a name scope) is an abstract container or environment created to hold a logical grouping of unique identifiers or symbols (i.e., names). An identifier defined in a namespace is associated only with that namespace. The same identifier can be independently defined in multiple namespaces. That is, the meaning associated with an identifier defined in one namespace may or may not have the same meaning as the same identifier defined in another namespace. Languag...

   JavaScript,namespace,example     2012-05-10 04:57:17

  Why so many Python web frameworks?

When asked about the plethora of web frameworks for Python the answer is often that it is way too easy to put together one in Python. That certainly seems plausible since there are so many libraries that implement the components of a web framework and if it's easy to plug those pieces together then maybe that lowers the bar of entry for new frameworks. So let's give it a shot, we'll pick some components and spend a couple hours seeing how far we can get building a web framework, which we...

   Python,Web framework,Dynamic scripting language,Web design     2012-02-13 05:32:48

  Perl Documentation in Terms of Tasks

The core Perl community—if you care to draw lines around a group of people who use Perl seriously and call that a community—is like many other core F/OSS communities. Real work happens on mailing lists and IRC. I unsubscribed from several mailing lists and deliberately spent as little time on IRC as possible this year, for various uninteresting reasons. (I haven't even made it to the Portland Perl Monger...

   Perl,Documentation,Process     2011-12-27 09:40:09

  Buffcacher

What should a ‘cache’ be? It means a lot of things, but to my mind the default programming type should be: “keep around expensive-to-generate bits of read-only data in case we need them again, or until the computer really needs that RAM for something else” I was writing a custom video editing program in Python (interesting choice of language for that problem) and I wanted to cache decoded frames; but I just wasn’t happy with the memory management of explici...

   Buffer,Cache,Web browser,Memory,RAM     2012-02-24 05:10:10

  C++ Without Fear: Functions

A function is a group of related statements that accomplish a specific task. Understanding functions is a crucial step to programming in C++, as Brian Overland explains in this chapter from his book.The most fundamental building block in the programming toolkit is the function—often known as procedure or subroutinein other languages. A function is a group of related statements that accomplish a specific task. Once you define a function, you can execute it whenever you need ...

   C++,Feature,Function,Elaboration,Fear     2011-09-03 11:03:11

  True Scala complexity

Update 2: Sorry for the downtime. Leave it to the distributed systems guy to make his blog unavailable. Nginx saves the day.It’s always frustrating reading rants about Scala because they never articulate the actual complexities in the core language.Understandable—this post is intended fill that gap, and it wasn’t exactly easy to put together. But there’s been so much resistance to the very thought that the complexity exists at all, even from on up high, that I thou...

   Scala,Complexity     2012-01-10 07:17:07

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