Standard C

Sep 20, 2010

Objective-C era

Minimalist Cocoa programming

In this post, I build and run a Cocoa Mac application on the command-line. This might not sound like a very difficult goal but I'll attempt to follow an additional constraint: use as few tools, components, classes and even lines of code as possible; truly minimalist Cocoa programming. The goal is to create an application that qualifies as a proper Mac application (including a menubar and a window) but without using Xcode, without an Info.plist file, without NIB files, without Interface Builder and without even using a text editor other than the Terminal itself.

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Aug 30, 2010

Objective-C era

Alternative Objective-C object allocation for large arrays

In this post, I'll show you how you can create objects without using the standard instance allocation process (either +[NSObject alloc] or class_createInstance()). I'll also explain why you might do this — the benefits and drawbacks to a custom object creation process.

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May 12, 2010

Objective-C era

A look at how malloc works on the Mac

In this post, I'll take a high-level look at how malloc is implemented on the Mac. I'll look at how memory is allocated for "tiny", "small" and "large" allocation scales, the multi-core performance improvements introduced in Snow Leopard and some inbuilt debugging features you can trigger for finding memory problems including buffer overruns.

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Feb 21, 2010

Objective-C era

Resolving a path containing a mixture of aliases and symlinks

Resolving symlinks in a path is very easy in Cocoa (it can be done in a single statement) but aliases require more work. Additionally the commands for resolving symlinks and aliases are incompatible with each other — meaning that you can resolve a path containing symlinks or aliases but not a mixture of the two. In this post, I present a category on NSString that will allow you to resolve a path containing any combination of symlinks or aliases as simply as resolving symlinks alone.

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Feb 8, 2010

Objective-C era

Custom build rules, generated tables and faster floating point

As fast as computers are, heavy use of floating point functions can still slow them down. One way around this, is to use a lookup table instead of calculating floating point values at runtime. But keeping a generated table up-to-date is annoying work. In this post, I'll show you how to create a lookup table automatically using a custom build rule, making an OpenGL animation 5 times faster in the process.

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Oct 18, 2009

Objective-C era

How blocks are implemented (and the consequences)

This post is a look at how clang implements blocks and how this implementation leads to a number of strange behaviors including local variables that end up global, Objective-C objects allocated on the stack instead of the heap, C variables that behave like C++ references, Objective-C objects in non-Objective-C languages, copy methods that don't copy and retain methods that don't retain.

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Oct 12, 2009

Objective-C era

Objective-C's niche: why it survives in a world of alternatives

Objective-C remains an impediment for many programmers coming to the Mac or iPhone platforms — few programmers have ever experienced it before learning Cocoa, forcing two learning curves at once for new Cocoa developers. How did Apple end up with such a weird language? And for a company known to replace CPU architectures and their entire operating system, why does Apple persist with Objective-C? The answer lies in the methods.

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Oct 5, 2009

Objective-C era

The ugly side of blocks: explicit declarations and casting.

Blocks are a welcome addition to C/Objective-C/C++/Objective-C++ with Snow Leopard but they carry with them the worst aspect of Standard C: function pointer declaration and casting syntax. In this post, I'll show you how to understand declarations and casting syntax for blocks and function pointers, even in the worst of scenarios.

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Sep 16, 2009

Objective-C era

Building for earlier OS versions from Snow Leopard

It is very easy, when developing on a new operating system, to create projects that won't run on any previous OS version. To ensure backwards compatibility, there are Xcode and gcc options that allow you to build while maintaining support for earlier OS versions. In this post, I'll look at the ways in which this compatibility is controlled and some of the new ways it can go wrong on Snow Leopard.

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Jul 23, 2009

Objective-C era

Temporary files and folders in Cocoa

If you need to use temporary files in your application and you search the Cocoa documentation for "temporary file", you're unlikely to find anything that explains how to create one. Since temporary files and folders are subject to a number of security issues and race conditions when done wrong, it is important to know the correct way to create them. I'll show you some code that you can copy and paste into your applications to create temporary files and folders safely.

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Jun 10, 2009

Objective-C era

Method names in Objective-C

Compared to other languages, method names in Objective-C are weird. They're long, they're wordy, they include names for the parameters and they seem to repeat information you can get elsewhere. Despite these apparent negatives, Objective-C method naming can save you time and effort. I'll show you how methods are named so that you can predict them without documentation and understand how methods work and how they use their parameters from their names alone.

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Jun 3, 2009

Objective-C era

Base64 encoding options on the Mac and iPhone

On Unix platforms, a common approach for Base64 encoding is to use libcrypto (the OpenSSL library). However, like most C libraries, you need to wrap it to integrate with Objective-C data types (like NSData and NSString) and it isn't available on the iPhone. I'll show you how to handle base64 encoding/decoding with OpenSSL and without so you can handle the Mac and iPhone equally.

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May 10, 2009

Objective-C era

Variable argument lists in Cocoa

This week I'll talk about methods that take variable numbers of arguments, also known as variadic methods. I'll show you the Objective-C syntax and implementation, give a quick rundown of the ways that Cocoa classes provide variable argument support and I'll also show you a way to fake va_list parameters to handle Cocoa's variadic method equivalents at runtime.

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Mar 28, 2009

Objective-C era

Using NSKeyedArchiver to archive a C linked-list

NSKeyedArchiver provides some support for archiving C primitive types but provides no support for pointers to C structs. I'll show you how you can archive a linked list of C structs, despite the lack of support in NSKeyedArchiver.

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Oct 31, 2008

Objective-C era

Using libxml2 for XML parsing and XPath queries in Cocoa

NSXMLDocument is the normal tree-based XML parser in Cocoa. But if you're writing for the iPhone, this class isn't available. Even on the Mac, sometimes you want tree-based parsing without the full overhead of NSXMLDocument. Here's how to use libxml2 to perform tree-based parsing in a Cocoa-friendly way.

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Aug 2, 2008

Objective-C era

String philosophies: char arrays, std::string and NSString

Each of the major C variants on the Mac implement character strings in their own way. It is fairly easy to learn the syntax differences between them but a simple API Reference doesn't explain the reasons for implementations: the different philosophies behind the implementations. In this post, I'll go past the 'How' of string differences and instead explain the 'Why' of differences between the three string implementations.

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Apr 14, 2008

Objective-C era

Type punning isn't funny: Using pointers to recast in C is bad.

A very common C technique for reinterpreting data types has the potential to cause nasty bugs. Apple knows this, which is why the implementation of NSRectToCGRect (correctly) doesn't do what the documention claims. I show you a technique to perform reinterpret casts safely in your own code.

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