The official website of Fishing Cactus is now available in French. For all our french readers it is now time to discover all our funny jokes and grammar mistakes in their own language. However we will keep this blog in English to avoid the overhead of maintaining the blog in both French and English.
Archive for July, 2009
Website is now available in French
Friday, July 24th, 2009Cross Platform Thread Local Storage
Monday, July 20th, 2009It’s been a while since I post something technical here. We are currently really busy on our new secret project, but I have something to share.
Some compilers have an interesting property : __declspec(thread) for Microsoft cl.exe, __thread for Gcc. By using this declaration on a global variable, a copy of the variable is created for each thread. This is known as a Thread Local Storage (TLS). You can always use direct calls to the system’s API ( TLSGetValue and TLSSetValue for Windows, pthread_getspecific and pthread_setspecific for POSIX systems), but using automatic TLS variable is very comfy. As you may know, Mojito is available on several platforms, some of them does not provide those kind of variables. And if provided, those variables are limited to POD (Plain Ol’ data) variables. So we search for a solution that is close to what compiler can offer.
Interview on Belgium iPhone
Wednesday, July 8th, 2009
Alex, one of the redactor at Belgium iPhone interviewed us to know a little bit more about the company, its current projects on iPhone and our point of view regarding the new iPhone 3GS and OS 3.0.
You can find the interview in french here. It was, for us, the right time to have a photoshooting session in front of the office and show you some new faces!
GDC09 : Parallelism in AI & AIGamedev.net conf
Sunday, July 5th, 2009At last GDC, I had the chance to talk about multithreading applied to AI. The talk was part of the AI summit. The summit was a great experience and I would recommend it to anybody interested in AI. I was also invited to talk about multithreading at the AIGameDev.net conference. You can find the notes and slides on the website. Gamedev.net also covered the event
It’s been a while since I posted a technical article, but I’ve one nearly ready to go. It will talk about Thread Local Storage.
The slides from GDC can be download here
