Adam Horvath's blog

Even though introspective sort was invented in 1997 (by David Musser) and was taken on  by many frameworks no too long after, Microsoft decided to add it to the .NET platform only in 2012. However, it worth having a look at the implementation, it’s quite smartly written. Introsort Currently the fastest sorting algorithm is quicksort but it’s got a couple of edge cases when it performs really poorly – in O(n^2) time instead of the O(n*log(n)) typical runtime. Even though a smart pivot selection makes it practically impossible to have an O(n^2) runtime, “evil” input can force the sorting to fall into this, making the running time much longer than expected. Musser had two ideas to speed up the typical quicksort algorithm: If the algorithm on any sub-array runs longer than expected (recursion is deeper than log(array size) ) then let’s switch to heapsort which is guaranteed to finish in O(n*log(n)) time If the number of elements is small enough don’t use quicksort, si...

While I see the LINQ on the .NET platform one of the best if not the best language feature, I think the async-await idea is more like smoke in the mirror than anything else. Actually, it’s even worse: as the underlying operations are not trivial in some cases we are better off using linear code. Idea based on desktop apps The whole async-await idea is mostly coming from the cumbersomeness of desktop GUI applications and UI threads: only a single thread can modify the UI so when a long running process finishes we need to ask the UI thread to display the result for us but the operation itself cannot update the UI. It’s not a language problem; it’s a Windows/framework problem. However, Microsoft decided to “solve” it with a language feature, because: Concurrent programming is a hot topic and Microsoft wanted to “be there” C# language evolves fast so adding a new feature is quite easy While the latter is a great thing (hey Java, can you hear me?), adding a language feature b...

Once in a while it is worth looking around what kind of software or in this case hardware solutions were invented that did not catch enough attention. This post is about three hardware designs that amaze me. Stirling engine The Otto engine is by far the most successful engine we know these days but it requires special kind of fuel like gasoline or gases to operate. In some cases it is not available but cheap heat source can be accessed, like burning solid materials or focusing solar energy with mirrors. In this case a stirling engine can convert heat into mechanical movement in an easy way. The idea is based on the rules of thermodynamics: the temperature of the gas always equals to pressure multiplied by volume (within constant factor). This basically means if we heat up the gas it expands or the pressure needs to rise. Similarly, if we decrease the pressure, the volume or the temperature has to drop (or both moving together). The stirling engine is basically a two cylinder...

Finally Microsoft realized they are not the only software vendors out there so they started to support other suppliers on their cloud platform, Windows Azure. Apart from the stock images from Microsoft, BitNami publishes their own high quality virtual machines as well – mostly based on some kind of Linux system. One of their images is a completely set up and ready to use Git source control solution using GitLab. This could really save a lot of time for us as the installation guide seems to be a little longer than anyone would prefer spending on setting up Git. To install the image simply Browse VM Depot, select the GitLab image and create a new virtual machine from it. Microsoft went so far with supporting Linux systems that we can even enter our own username and password for the box during setup, no need to use any default logins on the fresh machine. GitLab setup isn’t particularly resource hungry, so we are perfect fine with the extra small (A0) instance to host our git/wik...