The noble craft of software development

The producer-consumer pattern allows a producer thread to generate data (e.g loaded from disk or read from a web site) and put in a queue, concurrently with a thread that consumes the data from the queue.

A typical application of this is the processing of multiple disk files. When done in a single threaded, sequential manner, the CPU mostly sits idle while waiting for the disk during file load. The disk, in turn, doesn’t do anything useful while waiting for the CPU to finish processing a file before the next one is loaded. Using the producer-consumer pattern, the files are loaded from the disk and queued while the CPU processes files already in the queue, speeding up the processing of the second and all subsequent files. To boot, you get the possibility of running multiple producers and multiple consumers concurrently, as well as the smug feeling that goes with it. Read more

A rumour that Attachmate fired the Mono team has circulated around the net the last two weeks, but there has been some uncertainty as Miguel de Icaza’s blog remained silent on the subject. To add to the confusion, a few tweets here and there from Miguel and others, suggested that things weren’t as bad as they were rumoured to be. Alas, things are just that bad, as was to be expected. Miguel wrote about it in his blog yesterday.

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Judging from a few questions on stackoverflow and hubFS, programmers new to F# sometimes confuse value assignments with functions that don’t take arguments. This confusion is easily straightened out. In fact, it’s so easily straightened out, that it’s not really enough for a blog post. Thus, we spice things up a bit by letting the value assignment assign a function value, and throw in closures and something about the practical differences between stack and heap values for good measure.

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