eosgarden: Latest articles

GDB tutorial

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 07:49:01 +0100

I have to admit I always felt stupid, while building XCode projects, when the GDB window comes out, or when it display a message like: «set a breakpoint in malloc to debug».
So I decided to learn a few things about GDB. This tutorial will explain you some of the basics.

Calling conventions

Tue, 03 May 2011 16:52:29 +0200

Programming languages let us write human readable code, with concepts like variables, functions, objects, methods, etc.
Those concepts don't exists for a computer, and the human readable code needs to be converted into machine code (compilation), so the CPU can execute it.
This article explains how functions are called, from a machine code perspective.

Reference counting in ANSI-C

Sat, 23 Apr 2011 14:48:29 +0200

Memory management can be a hard task when coding a C program.
Some higher level programming languages provide other ways to manage memory.
Main variants are garbage collection, and reference counting.
This article will teach you how to implement a reference counting memory management system in C.

Detecting idle time and activity with I/O Kit

Thu, 03 Feb 2011 17:16:08 +0100

It may be sometimes useful, from an application, to know if the user is currently interacting with the computer (or phone), or if he's away.
This article explains how to detect user's activity, on Mac OS X and on iOS.

Using static libraries with XCode

Tue, 01 Feb 2011 20:02:32 +0100

It's often usefull to split an XCode project in several parts: the UI related code, and the code that's not related to the UI (tools, libraries, etc).
Such a split has many advantages. It allows different compilation settings for each part and a better compilation time, as each part is built separately, if needed.
This article will teach you how to setup such an XCode project.

Understanding floats

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 15:40:55 +0100

Single precsion floating point numbers are usually called 'float', or 'real'. They are 4 bytes long, and are packed the following way, from left to right:

C & Objective-C quiz

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 15:40:54 +0100

This quiz will test your knowledge of the ANSI-C and Objective-C programming languages.
The following topics are covered:

Data types
Memory management
Pointer arithmetic
Compiler issues
Portability
Standard C library
Macros
Objective-C syntax
Objective-C runtime
Objective-C object features
Cocoa framework
iPhone development

Cocoa: Delegate chain system

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 15:40:53 +0100

Delegation is a concept available in some classes of the Cocoa framework, on Mac OS X (and of course, on iPhone OS).
That concept allows Cocoa application developers to interact on specific events of core Cocoa objects.

Using boolean data-types with ANSI-C

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 15:40:52 +0100

Boolean data types are certainly the most often used data-type in any programming language.
They are the root of any programming logic.
Nowadays, few people remember that the boolean data type wasn't defined with the ANSI (C89) C programming language.

Closure and lambda in Objective-C

Tue, 25 Jan 2011 15:40:52 +0100

Many scripting languages allows the use of «lambda» or «anonymous functions». That concept is often associated with the «closure» concept.
Such concepts are well known in JavaScript, ActionScript or PHP since version 5.3.
The Objective-C language offers an implementation of both concepts, called «blocks».
Blocks are available since Mac OS X 10.6, thanks to the use of Clang.