A Byte of Coding Issue 361

Hey-yo,

Hope you had a nice weekend! Here’s the issue.

Write code top-down

Published: 22 September 2015

Tags: architecture, design patterns

An older article, but timeless advice. Lawrence Kesteloot elaborates on what top-down and bottom-up approaches to building software systems are, then explains why the former is superior.

Some highlights:

• “With top-down design you start with a vision of the whole program, perhaps what some of the components are, and how they fit together, but the components themselves are still fuzzy”

• “With bottom-up design you start with the components, which you see clearly, but it’s not yet clear how they fit together”

• top-down is harder but produces better results, bottom-up is easier but leads to a lot of wasted time and unnecessary complexity

Animation Blend Spaces without Triangulation

Published: 19 February 2024

Tags: animation, c, games, math

Daniel Holden discusses a different approach to combining animations, using a paper from 20 years ago.

Some highlights:

• triangulating data points for 2D animations can be very sensitive to tweaks and expensive in higher dimensions

• an alternative is to use linear algebra (example implemented in article)

• the latter approach can also be adjusted to work as a neural network

The Whitehouse report on adopting memory safety

Published: 3 March 2024

Tags: c, rust, c++, infosec

Derek Jones brings to light the realities of memory safety in c and rust.

Some highlights:

• programming languages aren’t the problem; it’s how they’re used

• completely “memory safe programming languages” don’t exist

• c/c++ have many reported issues because they’re used in tons of software