LLVM garbage collection statepoints demo

I’m looking at garbage collection with statepoints in LLVM, and with substantial difficulty I’ve got to a point where I have a working example, which I intend to fit the actual GC into later. This post is my attempt to help others get started on statepoints with less difficulty. It begins with a brief explanation… Continue reading LLVM garbage collection statepoints demo

A simple Opus audio player with JNI

In this fourth part of the JNI tutorial series, we use the Java native interface to maintain an external resource with a state. Specifically, our example opens and plays an Opus audio file through the opusfile API, but the pattern is general enough to be used for any kind of resource. Getting a handle As… Continue reading A simple Opus audio player with JNI

Error handling in JNI

In this second part of the JNI tutorial series, we attack error handling, to get that annoying subject out of the way as soon and as much as possible. There’s no complete example for this part in the tutorial example zip file (because you can’t write a program that only does error handling), but you… Continue reading Error handling in JNI

Support for Vorbis and Opus, not MP3

I’ve kept a reminder on my todo-list for a long time that I should not implement MP3 file support, but a couple of weeks ago i rebelled and started doing it anyway, which ended up as yet another decision to not do it. Instead, I implemented Ogg Vorbis support for playing .ogg files and streaming… Continue reading Support for Vorbis and Opus, not MP3

The things you have to do for an interactive terminal interface

Programming language libraries usually expect terminal interaction to take place one print line or read line at a time, and don’t have much support for detecting keypresses or changing what’s already written on the screen. Still, POSIX and other generally followed standards allow more dynamic interaction techniques that are compatible across many systems, and this… Continue reading The things you have to do for an interactive terminal interface

ALSA broken pipe errors

Since last summer, when I changed Klipspringer to access ALSA directly, I’ve had problems with occasional sudden stops in playback and capture, caused by broken pipe errors from the ALSA interface. This post contains the information I would have needed – but failed to find when searching the internet – to solve the problem when… Continue reading ALSA broken pipe errors

Pictures from FLAC metadata

From version 4.0.6, the FLAC library includes support for extracting pictures embedded in FLAC file metadata. To use it, create a subclass of FlacDecoder that implements the PictureTarget interface. You can take FlacPictures as an example of what you can do. That’s a utility program which is included in the full Klipspringer installation as the command… Continue reading Pictures from FLAC metadata

Ten standard ways of representing binary numbers

If you’ve read the headline and think that ten sounds like an awful lot of different binary-number formats, perhaps you are guessing that it includes floating point, or ones’ complement and other archaic representations, but no, this is all about what’s in common current use, all integers, and all based on two’s complement. This post… Continue reading Ten standard ways of representing binary numbers