Wednesday, February 10, 2010

Perl Profilers - Devel::NYTProf

Keeping up the spirit of a blog post from Leo Lapworth, I am advocating the use of Devel::NYTProf and doing my bit to get its name out there. On a number of occasions it has saved me a lot of time searching for bottlenecks in my Perl code and also pointed out parts of code that seemed unsuspicious.

The docs on the CPAN page are very clear in its usage, so I won't bore anyone with the details here.

So as far as profiling Perl code goes, Devel::NYTProf is definitely the winner!

Tuesday, February 2, 2010

Programming Goals for Common Lisp

First post of the year... Somehow I was too busy for the whole of January to post anything. Anyway, moving on...

I've been yearning to use cl-opengl and Vecto for SOMETHING but can never seem to come up with any ideas. The only useful thing I have used cl-opengl for is a cellular automata simulator, but it's all very basic and minimal. So instead of trying to come up with a new idea, I'm going to re-use an old idea and extend cl-mines; my small, currently CLI-based, Minesweeper game.

I intend to use Vecto to generate each of the images for the mines and uncovered tiles. Not the most intense usage for Vecto, but it's better than nothing for now.

And I, obviously, intend to use cl-opengl for displaying and running the whole game.

Another, secondary, goal is to use more macros, if appropriate. Macros are a feature of Common Lisp I am yet to use in a complex way and is a skill I think I'm missing out on with Lisp.

So that's what I am going to be slowly working on in my spare time between everything else! That should keep me busy for a little while, I hope.