I've been horsing around a lot lately with Windows Script Host for various reasons, some more interesting than others. I've actually done a bunch of random things to make it much more palatable under Visual Studio 2012: perhaps I'll share some of that...

A coworker on the CLR dropped by recently, having hit a brick wall about some problem he was having with some ASM code for x64 that was trying to tail call.  He has already grep’ed through the ABI docs, and had actually hit this blog prior to knocking...

My wife just asked "What's an 'after-sales engineer'?" I parsed the terms, and came up with "Tech Support Dude". As a teenager, I was a Foliage Architect (I mowed lawns), System Builder (computer assembly slave), Network Administrator (very poorly paid...

I just watched the highly lame “You wouldn’t steal a car…Downloading pirated movies is stealing ” ‘trailer’. How’s this for irony: I watched this trailer because it was the SECOND thing to play on the DVD of Die...

The spam bots have been causing me all sorts of trouble - I had over 1000 messages informing me that some spam has been deleted over the weekend. I'm going to kill comments, and hope that in a few months, (after I get a chance to write up something of...

<RETRACTION> Crap. After getting a couple of comments saying they tried the same thing, and it didn't work for them, I went back and tried it myself. And it turns out it doesn't work. I think I had tried it with some media that I had already...

I've recently been trolling the web for any sort of language-comparision benchmarks, to see how the CLR's JIT stacks up to the competition. Dr. Dobbs has what seemed to be a pretty reasonable micro-benchmark article . It's not particularly insightful...

I've recently been deluged by a pile of new electronic gadgets* so that I haven't had time to do much coding. So I was looking around yesterday and found that there's (finally) a new version of Boost available. I was actually underwhelmed by the lack...

Disclaimer: I've never actually written an unwind personality routine, so take what's here with a grain of salt. A few days back, I spent 30 minutes defending the C++ runtime's exception handling personality routine to the guy that has the less than...

I had a brief e-mail exchange with one of the devs on the optimizer team about a checkin he put up for review. He modified the compiler so that it only aligns the stack for functions that call other functions - that's the typical definition in compiler...

I recently switched from the lead of the Code Gen & Tools team for Visual C++ to the lead for the Code Gen team for the .Net Framework. I've not used managed code much, but for some classes of code, it sure does look easier to use [I'm working on...

I'll be hanging out with the cool kids at the Northwest C++ Users Group tomorrow night. If you're in the area, and want to heckle me, swing by. We'll be in building 40 at 6:30 PM. My talk starts at 7:00 PM. I'm talking about the actual runtime cost of...

Imagine this very lame code: int main() {} void BugAsm() { __asm { MOV [ESP+12],OFFSET main } } void(*BugAsmPt)()=&BugAsm; // this is just to make sure the function is not removed by /OPT:REF Now imagine your significantly less...

{Disclaimer - I started with a bunch of code from boost::array - it's a great implementation of the functionality it provides} While my day job doesn't generally allow me to goof around with advanced C++ features, I still managed to find time to do...

If you're porting your application to x64, and you use much in the way of __asm in your x86 code, you're likely to start looking at ml64 - the 64 bit version of Masm. The reason you're likely to do this is that the x64 compiler doesn't support __asm blocks...

My role for the past 6 months (and the next several) I'm charged with effectively "going down with the ship" WRT the current generation of code gen & tools for Visual C++. This includes the linker, Masm, ml64, DIA, c2, pdb, and a few other miscellaneous...

Let’s say you have a programming language, K-- version 1.0, with it’s accompanying runtime library, stdK--. And it turns out that the language needed some new features, like concepts, thread safety, concurrency, a strong memory model, improved security...

They're not marvelously better, but they include the introduction that I wrote a couple years ago (and have mirrored in this blog twice, now). So, check out http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/7kcdt6fy(VS.80).aspx to see the x64 ABI stuff in all...

There's a class of tools that lots of people write that replace cl.exe with a 'wrapper' to do things link pre-process a command line [perhaps adding particular -D arguments], or filtering the output to deal with things like psychotically complicated error...

Explains in hand-wavy, high level terms what hot-patchability is, why you might want it, and how it works....

A Summary of the x64 calling conventions with links to the official document - a handy reference for folks just starting to port a compiler, or needing to author some assembly code....

__assume and __forceinline were the first two features I implemented as a developer out of college. I just resolved a bug as 'By Design' that asked the question posed in the title. Here's a brief explanation: First, __assume(n==x) basically tells the...

I tried out Windows Vista 64 on a machine for a while, but had need of a more stable system (I generally wait to self-host on OS'es until Beta 2). So I reinstalled XP64, and on a lark, checked. What do you know: http://www.microsoft.com/hardware has 64...

A brief discussion of how to author simple x64 unwind data for assembly files...

The poor sucker in my wife's family that drew my name for the annual christmas gift exchange bought me a copy of Fiona Apple's new album, Extraordinary Machine (which is an excellent album, BTW, and took all my self control not to purchase earlier). As...