Picking your Smart Pointers

Introduction

I wanted to do a quick write up on the Boost library’s Smart Pointers and when they should and shouldn’t be used. I’d hope to use this post in future (if the knowledge doesn’t stick in my head) as a rough guide when finding the right tool for the job. For the uninitiated, I strongly advise that you go through the smart pointer documentation on the Boost website as it’s a real eye-opener as to just how hands-off you can now be with dynamic memory allocation in C++ (these days).

Why use Smart Pointers?

Smart pointers will help you manage the lifetime of your objects. It will force you to think about the ownership of these pointers and who’s currently “in-charge” in some cases. They will allow you to think in terms of observation of objects so that you don’t disturb the ownership of a resource and they just generally make your code cleaner, easier to maintain and read.

How can I start using Smart Pointers?

Get Boost! That’s going to be the best way. Dive right in, take a look at samples, set things up, blow them up - be a scientist about it! Anyway, enough of this! On to the pointers.

scoped_ptr & scoped_array

scoped_ptr is all about ensuring that the pointer that you’re working with is the ultimate owner of the resource that it points to. There’s no facility within this pointer type to transfer the ownership of the inner resource elsewhere. With all of this in mind, scoped_ptr ensures that the resource that is under ownership will be destroyed properly once the pointer has dropped out of scope. scoped_ptr is a very lightweight resource. It’s by no means going to harm the performance or size of your application. scoped_array will perform the same service as scoped_ptr does, it’s just that scoped_array will work on array types (as the name suggests).

shared_ptr & shared_array

shared_ptr is all about reference counting. They will internally manage the reference count that they have and govern the managed resource’s lifespan based on this. The clear advantage that they have over the scoped_ptr and scoped_array counterparts is their ability to be shared between multiple owner so that those owners can maintain their interest in the object by “hanging around”. The true power of this class of pointer is when you don’t know when to delete the underlying resource. As long as someone is referencing you, you’ll stay alive. shared_array will perform the same service as shared_ptr does, it’s just that shared_array will work on array types (deja vu anyone?)

intrusive_ptr

The intrusive_ptr is another reference counting pointer only is allows you to provide your own mechanism for performing the reference counting. This means if you have an existing codebase that does all of this work for you, all you need to do is provide it to an intrusive_ptr. intrusive_ptr also allows for native usage of the this keyword.

weak_ptr

A weak_ptr just performs observation on a shared_ptr without getting its hands into ownership. It’s used purely at an observation capacity.

Conclusion

That’s it for a brief smart pointer analysis. Hopefully these tid-bits will help you decide which pointer fits your problem best.

A brief MapReduce tutorial for MongoDB

Introduction

This is just a short tutorial on using the MapReduce operation from within the MongoDB environment.

What is it and how does it work?

MapReduce is a database operation. Its intended for performing higher-level (or more complex) aggregation tasks across huge data stores. You supply it with two functions, a map function and a reduce function and it will supply you with the aggregated result. As it’s defined from the MongoDB documentation, the operation takes the following form:

db.collection.mapReduce(
                         <mapfunction>,
                         <reducefunction>,
                         {
                         	out: <collection>,
                         	query: <document>,
                         	sort: <document>,
                         	limit: <number>,
                         	finalize: <function>,
                         	scope: <document>,
                         	jsMode: <boolean>,
                         	verbose: <boolean>
                         }
)

You can immediately see the first two parameters to this operation as the map function and the reduce function. The remaining parameter is focused on the delivery of the result back to you.

The Map Function

The map function is responsible for defining the data that you want to work with. For instance, if you’re interested in accumulating the sum of all products sold by their category you will want to return both the amount sold per line item as well as the product’s category.

var mapFunction = function() {
	emit(this.category, this.price);
};

Note the use of the emit function. Its use tells the MapReduce operation that the key for this process will be category and the value will be price. The value part of the emit function can also take form of a javascript object itself should you need to perform multiple aggregations across the same data set.

var mapFunction = function() {
    emit(this.category, { price: this.price, count: 1 });
};

This particular map function gives us a count of 1 per result that comes out so we would be able to not only sum the price but find out how many items made up the sum as well.

The Reduce Function

The reduce function is responsible for performing the aggregation on the data emitted by the map function. It is passed the key-values emitted by the map function as parameters to it. Performing the reduce function to get the sum of all prices and the number of items making up the sum total would look like this.

var reduceFunction = function(key, values) {
    outValue = { total: 0, count: 0 };

    // aggregate all of the values for this key
    for (var i = 0; i < values.length; i ++) {
        outValue.total += values[i].price;
        outValue.count += values[i].count;
    }

    return outValue;
};

All of the “magic” happens via-javascript. Pretty easy really.

Getting a result

Putting your map and reduce function together for the operation ends up looking like this (for a simple scenario).

var res = db.sales.mapReduce(
    mapFunction, 
    reduceFunction, 
    { 
    	out: "result"
    }
);

This will get the process underway against the database. Once it’s finished doing the hard-yards, then you can start basing your aggregation reports off of the “res” variable that we built just above by doing the following.

db[res.result].find();

This is only a “scratch-the-surface” - “know enough to be dangerous” type write-up. MapReduce is a complex and powerful tool that you should be reading the official documentation about if you want to achieve ninja-like status.

OpenGL, GLUT & Haskell

Introduction

We’re into some of the real good stuff here. One of my favourite topics in computer programming is graphics (2d and 3d). In this post, I get to make a start on some fun stuff and learn some Haskell at the same time. We’re going to open an OpenGL window, clear the back buffer out and flip.

The code

import Graphics.Rendering.OpenGL                
import Graphics.UI.GLUT                         
                                                
main :: IO ()                                   
main = do                                       
   -- initialize openGL                         
   (progname, _) <- getArgsAndInitialize        
   -- open up the application window            
   createWindow "Hello World"                   
   -- set the render proc and run the main loop 
   displayCallback $= display                   
   mainLoop                                     
                                                
display :: IO ()                                
display = do                                    
   -- clear the buffer and flip                 
   clear [ ColorBuffer ]                        
   flush                                        

Ok, ok, fair enough - this is almost a direct-rip from the [Haskell Wiki](http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/OpenGLTutorial1_, I’m not claiming it as my code. It’s more of a bookmark as a good foot-hold in the OpenGL-Haskell marriage!

Compilation

Getting your application compiled is cake, just make sure you specify GLUT as a package.

$ ghc -package GLUT Ogl.hs -o Ogl

That’s what it’s all about!

Learn you a Haskell Brisbane Study Group

As a bit of a bookmark to myself, I wanted to make mention of a study group that an old colleague had brought to my attention.

The wiki that has been put up for this project has been a great source of home-work as I’ve gone through the book. I haven’t yet made it to the end of the book but am working on it. It’s been important for me to have some home work to do on this topic as I don’t write Haskell professionally. Without something flexing my Haskell muscles, the knowledge tends to go on holiday rather quickly.

The learn repository has all of the source code and documents for the course.

Derived Instances for Types in Haskell

Introduction

When constructing your own types in Haskell, you can make your type support a particular behavior by making it an instance of the behavioral type class required. I’ll walk through each of these derivable behaviours and how they can help.

Eq

Eq gives your type a sense of equality amongst values of the same type. It allows you to use the == operator as it was intended, returning you a boolean.

data Employee = Employee { firstName :: String
                         , lastName :: String
                         , department :: String 
                         } deriving (Eq)

let mary = Employee { firstName = "Mary", lastName = "Jones", department = "Finance" }
let johnIT = Employee { firstName = "John", lastName = "Smith", department = "IT" }
let johnHR = Employee { firstName = "John", lastName = "Smith", department = "HR" }

-- would be False
mary == johnIT

-- would be True
johnIT /= johnHR

-- would be True
johnHR == Employee { firstName = "John", lastName = "Smith", department = "HR" }

From now on, == will do a comparison on the contents of the three strings in the Employee record for us.

Show

In my personal experience when defining types, I would be out of my mind not to make them derive Show. Show allows a value of your type to be put into string format - very useful for debug situations.

data Employee = Employee { firstName :: String
                         , lastName :: String
                         , department :: String 
                         } deriving (Show)
 
let mary = Employee { firstName = "Mary", lastName = "Jones", department = "Finance" }

-- Will print "Employee { firstName = "Mary", lastName = "Jones", department = "Finance" }"
putStr $ (show mary)

Just for the printing value, you can see how Show is worth its weight in gold.

Read

Read provides the reverse-service of what Show does. You’ll be able to take a type in its serialized format and re-construct a type from it. Again, rather useful in debug situations.

data Employee = Employee { firstName :: String
                         , lastName :: String
                         , department :: String 
                         } deriving (Show, Read)
 
let maryStr = "Employee { firstName = \"Mary\", lastName = \"Jones\", department = \"Finance\" }"
 
-- mary will now be a constructed Employee 
let mary = read $ maryStr :: Employee

I’ve also used this to do user-input rather cheaply. Probably not quite a “production solution” though having your users enter type data directly.

Ord

Ord gives your value order. Once you apply Ord you can sort or use operators like >, <, >=, <=.

data CardValue = Ace | Two | Three | Four | Five
               | Six | Seven | Eight | Nine | Ten
               | Jack | Queen | King
  deriving (Ord)

-- returns true
Four < Nine

-- returns GT
Three `compare` Two

Quite useful for when you need to do these sorts of comparisons.

Bounded

Bounded will give your type a sense of the lowest and highest values achievable. You’ll be able to ask questions of the type to see what these corresponding values are.

data CardValue = Ace | Two | Three | Four | Five
               | Six | Seven | Eight | Nine | Ten
               | Jack | Queen | King
  deriving (Bounded)

-- returns Ace
minBound :: CardValue

-- returns King
maxBound :: CardValue

Enum

Enum will give your type a sense of the predecessor and successor values. This is most important when dealing with ranges in using your type. Take a look at the following deck assembly. Without Bounded the list comprehensions would not be possible and this code would be a lot more verbose.

-- | Makes an ordered deck of cards                               
makeDeck :: [Card]                                                
makeDeck = [Card v s | v <- [Ace .. King], s <- [Heart .. Spade]]

That’s derived instances for you anyway. They’re a great help when constructing your own types in Haskell. I think an important follow up to this blog post is being able to use these classes in conjunction with the instance keyword so that we can supply the implementation to the definition. Using the card example, we could supply an Eq and Show instance as follows.

data CardSuit = Diamond | Heart | Club | Spade

-- Provide eq implementation
instance Eq CardSuit where
  Diamond == Diamond = True
  Heart == Heart = True
  Club == Club = True
  Spade == Spade = True
  _ == _ = False

-- Provide show implementation
instance Show CardSuit where
  show Diamond = "Diamonds"
  show Heart = "Hearts"
  show Club = "Clubs"
  show Spade = "Spades"

You can see here that it’s quite counter-productive to supply our own Eq implementation, but if we did have some funky rules on how we wanted equality operators to work it would be worth it. In the show implementation, I’ve tried to make the suits read a little more humanly. Around the card table, you would normally hear someone say “Do you have a 2 of clubs?” rather than “Do you have a 2 of club?”. The trailing “s” has been added in the show implementation. Neat.

Functor

Functor is applied to wrapper types. You’ll commonly see examples used with Maybe. You’ll use Functor when ever you need to supply an fmap implementation. Here is a simple example that creates a wrapper data type.

data Wrapper a = Wrapper a
   deriving (Show)

instance Functor Wrapper where
   fmap f (Wrapper a) = Wrapper (f a)

-- produces Wrapper 500
fmap (*50) (Wrapper 10)

Functor is useful for types that contain something, Lists, Maps, etc.