This week I learned...

• Remember when I linked ColorSchemer Online? Fun toy, huh? Well, forget about it. What you want is the ColorSchemer Gallery. Three thousand color schemes created by actual graphic designers or sampled from art and nature.

• How does a really good garbage collector compare to explicit memory management (malloc/free)? According to a 2005 paper (PDF) by Matthew Hertz and Emery D. Berger, the two strategies are pretty competitive, and GC can even be faster than malloc, as long as memory is plentiful. To remain on par with malloc, a GC program needs about 4 times as much heap memory!

  This may matter to me pretty soon, as we're working on replacing Mozilla's reference counting with a conservative tracing GC.

• I had never even heard of static single assignment form before around June, but now that I know a little about it, it's everywhere. GCC uses it. Java JITs use it. LLVM code is in SSA form by construction. The key insight behind the HotpathVM tracing JIT, where I first ran across SSA, is that a lot of the well-known SSA optimization algorithms become trivially easy when you run them on a single basic block at a time.

  Last week, apropos of nothing, someone described VHDL to me as “SSA-like”. And you know... that's a pretty good way of explaining it.

  Having just the most basic understanding of SSA has greatly changed my expectations of what optimizations a compiler will perform. Not that they're necessarily any more accurate now; just changed.

• I learned a couple things from the examples in this paper: Threads cannot be implemented as a library by Hans Boehm. I finally got around to actually reading (most of) those Intel slides on CPU memory models I posted over a month ago, and learned a lot there. To say that this stuff is not widely understood by people who write real-world multithreaded code is an understatement.

• I learned how an OpenGL program knows what you just clicked on. It's clever. First it applies a transform that maps that pixel of your view to the unit cube. Then it does a new pass over all the polygons in the whole scene, just as it does when rendering the scene—only this time it's not drawing anything. It's just interested in knowing which polygons intersect the unit cube, a fairly simple calculation.