tradeoff

Why should I ever use inline code?

I'm a C/C++ developer, and here are a couple of questions that always baffled me. Is there a big difference between "regular" code and inline code? Which is the main difference? Is inline code simply a "form" of macros? What kind of tradeoff must be done when choosing to inline your code? Thanks ...

What constitutes a good memory profile?

In designing any desktop applications, are there any general rules on how much memory should the application uses? For heavy-weight applications, those can be easily understood or at least profiled such as Firefox or Google Chrome. But for smaller utilities or line-of-business application, how much is an acceptable amount of memory usag...

Differences between System V and Posix semaphores.

What are the trade-offs between using a System V and a Posix semaphore? ...

Doesn't Passing in Parameters that Should Be Known Implicitly Violate Encapsulation?

I often hear around here from test driven development people that having a function get large amounts of information implicitly is a bad thing. I can see were this would be bad from a testing perspective, but isn't it sometimes necessary from an encapsulation perspective? The following question comes to mind: http://stackoverflow.com/...

Database alternatives?

I was wondering the trade-offs for using databases and what the other options were? Also, what problems are not well suited for databases? I'm concerned with Relational Databases. ...

Slow Update vs Slow Select

This is a question about tradeoffs. Imagine a social network. Each user has a status message, that he can change anytime. Whenever he does change it, all his friends are notified through a wall (like in Facebook). To make this work. We have 3 tables Users(id, name), FriendLists(userId, friendUserId), Notifications(?). Now let's assume...

Shortest-path algorithms which use a space-time tradeoff?

Problem: finding shortest paths in an unweighted, undirected graph. Breadth-first search can find the shortest path between two nodes, but this can take up to O(|V| + |E|) time. A precomputed lookup table would allow requests to be answered in O(1) time, but at the cost of O(|V|^2) space. What I'm wondering: Is there an algorithm which...

Why Android for enterprise applications?

Recently one of our clients is considering the posibility of picking up an old WinMobile 5.0 project. Several features are to be added to the point it will be a major version update. The client is worried about the mobile market, and thinks there's a chance all the effort put in this development will have to be thrown away in a couple ...

[Cocos2d] Pros and cons of using CCUIViewWrapper versus a ported functionality

I'm trying to understand the pros and cons of using something CCUIViewWrapper in Cocos2d versus a ported functionality. For instance, would it be better to use a UITableView in a CCUIViewWrapper, or to use the CCTableViewSuite. At first glance, I would assume the wrapper is the better approach since presumably it allows me to do everyt...

Why not mark everything inline?

First off, I am not looking for a way to force the compiler to inline the implementation of every function. To reduce the level of misguided answers make sure you understand what the inline keyword actually means. Here is good description, inline vs static vs extern. So my question, why not mark every function definition inline? ie ...