Google:
Traditionally, we were only looking at the raw textual content that we’d get in the HTTP response body and didn’t really interpret what a typical browser running JavaScript would see. When pages that have valuable content rendered by JavaScript started showing up, we weren’t able to let searchers know about it, which is a sad outcome for both searchers and webmasters.
In order to solve this problem, we decided to try to understand pages by executing JavaScript. It’s hard to do that at the scale of the current web, but we decided that it’s worth it. We have been gradually improving how we do this for some time. In the past few months, our indexing system has been rendering a substantial number of web pages more like an average user’s browser with JavaScript turned on.
Google JavaScript Search Web
Jonathon Mah:
The problem is revealed: there is work to be done after the recursive call: automatic reference counting inserted a release call for the value returned from node.next.
If we were writing this with manual retain/release, one wouldn’t insert any memory management calls into this at all, because -next returns an autoreleased object.
However when this is compiled under ARC, calls to objc_retainAutoreleasedReturnValue and objc_release are inserted to allow for another optimization — having the return value skip the autorelease pool entirely.
Unfortunately in this case, it conflicts with tail call optimization.
[…]
In an ARC environment, tail call optimization (and thus tail recursion) is too fragile. Don’t rely on it.
Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) Objective-C Optimization Programming
Ole Begemann:
When work started on the Mailbox app for Android, the team made the choice to write a large portion of the non-UI code in C++ — rather than rewriting the entire app in Java — with the goal of sharing that common C++ layer between iOS and Android. The iOS app used Core Data at the time, so migrating it off of Core Data to the shared C++ library was also part of the process. C++ seemed like an obvious choice because it is available on every platform and team members preferred the language over Java.
[…]
All UI code uses the native UI APIs on all platforms (Objective-C/UIKit on iOS, Java on Android). Most of the “model layer” code lives in the shared C++ library. Rather than calling it a model layer, Steven likened the design to a client-server architecture where the server (the C++ library) is never offline and has zero latency. Seeing the UI code and the shared library as two separate entities helps design clear interfaces between the two and thus keep the concerns properly separated.
The client-server architecture inside the app also predetermines how data is passed between the UI and the C++ layer. The two layers don’t access the same data objects. They use message passing to send copies of the data from A to B.
Android Android App C++ Programming Language Dropbox iOS iOS App Programming
Danny Sullivan:
At last, it’s time to dig into what happened with MetaFilter. The short story is that I don’t know. MetaFilter doesn’t know. Google knows, and so far, it’s not saying. But we can still do some analysis plus learn how difficult it is sometimes for a publisher to solve a Google penalty, if hit.
Google MetaFilter Web
David Sparks:
Google Documents really is the standard for online document collaboration. I’ve used that tool for years and, while it isn’t all that pretty, it absolutely nails the ability to have multiple people typing on one document at the same time. While Apple is now moving this direction, it hasn’t got there yet. Yesterday I had a small writing project with a Mac-savvy client and I decided to do it collaboratively with him using iCloud Pages. I figured that if the application can support 100 collaborators, it should be pretty solid with just two. It still isn’t.
iCloud iWork Pages.app Web
CrashProbe (via Daniel Jalkut):
CrashProbe is a crash reporting test suite presented by HockeyApp that benchmarks and compares popular iOS and Mac OS X crash reporting services. In our effort to ensure the best possible and most accurate crash reports, we created a set of test cases that we use to verify PLCrashReporter and improve HockeyApp.
Landon Fuller highlights a bug it found in Crashlytics that contradicts its marketing.
Debugging Developer Tool HockeyApp iOS Mac Open Source PLCrashReporter Programming
Informit (via Dr. Drang):
To celebrate the publication of the eBooks of The Art of Computer Programming, (TAOCP), we asked several computer scientists, contemporaries, colleagues, and well-wishers to pose one question each to author Donald E. Knuth. Here are his answers.
Algorithm Book CS Theory Donald Knuth E-books Programming TeX
