Do not underestimate the importance of the code refactoring

The refactoring is defined as the process of changing a software system in such a way that it does not alter the external behavior of the code yet improves its internal structure.

We can enumerate three cases concerning the code refactoring:

  •  Iterative refactoring: your application can’t be developed perfectly at the first iteration, even if the team has the best of the architects, designers and developers. The easy way to do refactoring without investing a lot of money and without wasting time is to integrate it in the development process and do it after each iteration.

Continue reading “Do not underestimate the importance of the code refactoring”

Learn design patterns from real projects: RigsOfRods case study.

The majority of developers have already heard about the design patterns, GOF(Gang Of Four) patterns are the most popularized, and each developer has his way to learn them , we can enumerate:

  • Reading a book.
  • From web sites.
  • From a collegue.
  • Doing a training.

Regardless of the method chose, we can learn by heart the patterns and spent hours to memorize their UML diagrams, but sometimes when we need to use them in a real project, it becomes more problematic. Continue reading “Learn design patterns from real projects: RigsOfRods case study.”

Will LLVM provide the missing glue between the languages?

The LLVM project started in 2000 at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, under the direction of Vikram Adve and Chris Lattner. LLVM was originally developed as a research infrastructure to investigate dynamic compilation techniques for static and dynamic programming languages. In 2005, Apple Inc. hired Lattner and formed a team to work on the LLVM system for various uses within Apple’s development systems.

The LLVM was adopted by many companies to build their tools, even Microsoft chose to use Clang as compiler for Visual Studio. Also they invest also the possibility to provides a .Net compiler based on LLVM. For our tool CppDepend we didn’t find better than Clang to use it as front end parser. Continue reading “Will LLVM provide the missing glue between the languages?”

The hidden cost of a high coupling with external frameworks.

Using frameworks accelerate the development of your projects, currently and for each language there  are many thousands of frameworks and libraries, each one of them has its advantages and its inconvenients and almost every project use at least one external framework. However make your project highly dependent to  an external framework comes with a price.

Let’s discover the impact of the high coupling for different actors of the project. Continue reading “The hidden cost of a high coupling with external frameworks.”

Exploring another MVC variant : PureMVC

According to MVC definition from wikipedia:

“Model View Controller (MVC) pattern creates applications that separate the different aspects of the application (input logic, business logic, and UI logic), while providing a loose coupling between these elements.”

We can enumerate many MVC frameworks : MVC1, MVC2, MVC3, MVPMVVM andPureMVC. Continue reading “Exploring another MVC variant : PureMVC”

A look inside the Resource Manager of the CRT Concurrency Runtime

Each Visual C++ version  comes with interesting new features and enhancements to simplify more native programming. The Concurrency Runtime is an added framework to simplify parallel programming and helps you write robust, scalable, and responsive parallel applications.The Concurrency Runtime raises the level of abstraction so that you do not have to manage the infrastructure details that are related to concurrency. The Concurrency Runtime also enables you to specify scheduling policies that meet the quality of service demands of your applications.Here’s the architecture of Concurrent Runtime Framework:

 

And to have more information’s about this framework, here’s a good introduction about it.

In this article we will discuss the Resource Manager layer, and try to discover how it works internally.For that CppDepend is used to analyse CRT Concurrency Runtime code source.

Before reading this article it’s better to take a look at these interesting articles about ResourceManager:

 

ResourceManager Design

Which classes are used by the ResourceManager to achieve its responsibility?

SELECT TYPES WHERE IsDirectlyUsedBy “Concurrency.details.ResourceManager

The first remark about this design is that it enforces the:

– High Cohesion: Many classes and structs are used by resource manager, each one has a specific responsability, it makes the design very clear.The single responsibility principle states that a class should have more than one reason to change. Such a class is said to be cohesive. A high LCOM value generally pinpoints a poorly cohesive class. There are several LCOM metrics. The LCOM takes its values in the range [0-1]. The LCOMHS (HS stands for Henderson-Sellers) takes its values in the range [0-2]. Note that the LCOMHS metric is often considered as more efficient to detect non-cohesive types.

LCOMHS value higher than 1 should be considered alarming.

WARN IF Count > 0 IN SELECT TYPES WHERE LCOMHS > 1 AND NbFields > 10 AND NbMethods >10 AND!IsGlobal ORDER BY LCOMHS DESC

 

 

So among classes used by ResourceManager, only UMS is considered as class with a poor cohesion.

– Low Coupling:Many interfaces and proxies are used to isolate ResourceManager from other components. The Scheduler communicate with ResourceManager but there’s no direct link between Two components, so how the scheduler communicate with ResourceManager?

To answer to this question let’s discover classes using ResourceManager:

SELECT TYPES WHERE IsDirectlyUsing “Concurrency.details.ResourceManager

 

 

Only these classes use the ResourceManager, and the Scheduler doesnt know the ResourceManager directly , so how it interact with it? let’s add to dependency graph the scheduler and interfaces used by it.

 

 

As shown in the dependency graph the Scheduler communicate with the ResourceManager using the interfaces IResourceManager,ISchedulere and ISchedulerProxy.

Where the ResourceManager is created?
SELECT METHODS WHERE DepthOfCreateA “Concurrency.details.ResourceManager” == 1

 

 

Only ResourceManager create an instance, and it’s a singleton so only one ResourceManager exist for the whole process.

Workflow of resource allocation:

Step 1: Get resources data from system
The Resource manager need all physical information’s concerning processors and cores to use them when allocating resources for schedulers. Let’s discover all data manipulated by this component.

SELECT FIELDS WHERE IsDirectlyUsedBy “Concurrency.details.ResourceManager

 

 

These structs represent all data needed by ResourceManager, the basic ones are ProcessorCore and ProcessorNode representing information’s about physical resources.

Other structs contains some scheduler data needed for the allocation algorithm.

The good news is that ResourceManager didnt directly access to fields of other logical classes used by it.

Let’s search where Resourcemanager get basic information’s about physical resources, for that we can search for methods using GetLogicalProcessorInformation.

SELECT METHODS WHERE IsDirectlyUsing “WindowsAPIGlobalMembers.GetLogicalProcessorInformation(PSYSTEM_LOGICAL_PROCESSOR_INFORMATION,PDWORD)

 

 

Only ResourceManager::InitializeSystemInformation use this method, to get information’s from system, but it’s this method responsible of populating ProcessorCore and ProcessorNode?

For that we can search for methods assigning a fields of ProcessorCore: SELECT METHODS WHEREIsDirectlyWritingField “Concurrency.details.ProcessorCore.m_processorNumber

 

 

So  the ResourceManager invokes the DetermineTopology method to populate data into structs.
And here’s a dependency graph showing the methods concerned by getting nodes and cores information’s.

 

 

Step2: Scheduler ask for resource allocation
After the ResourceManager get all data needed for allocation algorithm, a scheduler can ask it to allocate ressources.

When the Scheduler is created it ask for a ResourceManager and invokes CreateResourceManager to get the singleton, after that it invokes IResourceManager::RegisterScheduler to register it self with the resource manager, and get a pointer to ISchedulerProxy, and with this interface the Scheduler will interact with the resource manager.
After that the Scheduler is ready to ask for resources allocation by invocking RequestInitialVirtualProcessors.

 

 

And as explained before the Scheduler communicate with resource manager using IScheduleProxy interface to enforces low coupling, and the concrete implemenatation of this interface invoke ResourceManager::RequestInitialVirtualprocessors.

 

 

Step3: Resources allocation
The resource Manager have to give resources to schedulers when schedulers are created.It will do the allocation depending on the policies and taking into account the other schedulers in the process. Eventually the resources will be provided to the scheduler in need.

The entry point of allocating request is RequestInitialVirtualProcessors, and here’s a dependency graph showing methods used to acheive allocation.

 

 

PerformAllocation method implements the allocation logic, it ask for Scheduler policies from SchedulerProxy, and invoke AllocateCores method to perform allocation.

Here’s some characteristics of PerformAllocation and AllocateCores:

 


 

Thoses methods are very well documented and the cyclomatic complexity is not high, and it’s a good indicator that the algorithm of initial allocation is not very complicated.

Step4: giving resources to Scheduler
After ResourceManager allocate Resources , the scheduler is notified with resources allocated, for that the resource manager invoke GrantAllocation method.

 

 

What resources the ResourceManager have to give to Scheduler?
As described in msdn articles mentioned below related to resource manager, the resource is a virtual processor associated to a specific thread and runing in a specific core.
But as shown in the dependency graph the resource manager dont give VirtualProcessors to SchedulerProxy but an array of SchedulerNodes, the SchedulerProxy create VirtualProcessorRoot classes, VirtualProcessorRoot represent an abstraction for a hardware thread on which a thread proxy can execute.

Who is creating VirtualProcessor?
Before answering to this question let’s search for classes that represent a Virtual Processor, so let’s search for classes inheriting from this one.

 

 

So VirtualProcessor could concern a simple thread or an UMS Thread.
User-mode scheduling (UMS) is a light-weight mechanism introduced in Windows7 and Windows server 2008 R2, that applications can use to schedule their own threads. For more information, see User-Mode Scheduling.

Let’s search for methods creating ThreadVirtualProcessor.

 

 

So the Scheduler is the responsible of creating VirtualProcessors, and all information’s needed to create it are given by manager.

Step5:Dynamic managing resources
After the initial allocation of resources, the second main responsability of resource manager is to Constantly monitoring utilization of resources by schedulers, and dynamically migrating resources between schedulers.

And as shown in the following graph the resource manager create DynamicRM Thread,This worker thread wakes up at fixed intervals and load balances resources among schedulers.

 

And here’s the dependency graph of DynamicResourceManager:

 

 

Is ResourceManager customizable?
ResourceManager is well designed and is decoupled from other Concurrency Runtime framework by using interfaces, but it’s possible to customize the allocation behavior of resource manager.

For that let’s search for ResourceManager virtual methods:

SELECT METHODS FROM TYPES “Concurrency.details.ResourceManager” WHERE IsVirtual

 

 

Only these methods are virtual and they implements the IResourceManager methods,so it’s not possible to overload the allocation resource manager logic and customize it.

Continue reading “A look inside the Resource Manager of the CRT Concurrency Runtime”

XClarify for ObjC is now free for open source contributors.

We are pleased to announce that XClarify is now free for open source contributors and for research purposes. XClarify is an Objective C tool which simplifies managing a given ObjC code base. It enables you to analyze code structure, specify design rules, do effective code reviews and master evolution by comparing different versions of the code. 

Please refer here to have more detail how to get your free license.

Here are some interesting XClarify features: Continue reading “XClarify for ObjC is now free for open source contributors.”

XRay the LLVM\Clang source code

It’s proven that Clang is a mature compiler For C and C++ as GCC and Microsoft compilers, but what makes it special is the fact that it’s not just a compiler. It’s also an infrastructure to build tools. Thanks to its library based architecture which makes the reuse and integration of functionality provided more flexible and easier to integrate into other projects.

Clang Design:

Like many other compiler design, Clang compiler has three phase:

  • The front end that parses source code, checking it for errors, and builds a language-specific Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) to represent the input code.
  • The optimizer: its goal is to do some optimisaion on the AST generated by the front end.
  • The back end : that generate the final code to be executed by the machine, it depends of the target.

What the difference between Clang and the other compilers?

The most important difference of its design is that Clang is based on LLVM , the idea behind LLVM is to use LLVM Intermediate Representation (IR), it’s like the bytecode for java.
LLVM IR is designed to host mid-level analyses and transformations that you find in the optimizer section of a compiler. It was designed with many specific goals in mind, including supporting lightweight runtime optimizations, cross-function/interprocedural optimizations, whole program analysis, and aggressive restructuring transformations, etc. The most important aspect of it, though, is that it is itself defined as a first class language with well-defined semantics.

With this design we can reuse a big part of the compiler to create other compilers, you can for example just change the front end part to treat other languages.

It’s very interesting to go inside this powerful game engine and discover how it’s designed and implemented. C++ developers could learn many good practices from its code base.

Let’s XRay its source code using CppDepend and CQLinq to explore some design and implementation choices of its developement team. Continue reading “XRay the LLVM\Clang source code”

Make Your Visual C++ Experience Much Better.(Guest Post from Mike)

Visual C++ is one of the most used C++ IDEs which provides many interesting features to developers, each new version brings new major features and many extensions are available to add more nice features to it.

In this post, I will talk about some useful features provided by CppDepend. Continue reading “Make Your Visual C++ Experience Much Better.(Guest Post from Mike)”

Improve your C++ skills by exploring the Clang test suite.

Many resources exist talking about the better way to learn a programming language, we can enumerate:

  • Reading a book or a magazine.
  • Resources from web sites.
  • From a collegue.
  • Doing a training.
  • Explore open source projects.

Continue reading “Improve your C++ skills by exploring the Clang test suite.”