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In the C programming language, Duff's device is a way of manually implementing loop unrolling by interleaving two syntactic constructs of C: the do-while loop and a switch statement. Its discovery is credited to Tom Duff in November 1983, when Duff was working for Lucasfilm and used it to speed up a real-time animation program.
On modern processors, loop unrolling is often counterproductive, as the increased code size can cause more cache misses; cf. Duff's device. [1] The goal of loop unwinding is to increase a program's speed by reducing or eliminating instructions that control the loop, such as pointer arithmetic and "end of loop" tests on each iteration; [2 ...
Simon Tatham's contribution, [38] based on Duff's device, is a notable example of the genre, and is the basis for Protothreads and similar implementations. [39] In addition to Duff's objections, [ 24 ] Tatham's own comments provide a frank evaluation of the limitations of this approach: "As far as I know, this is the worst piece of C hackery ...
A loop-switch sequence [1] (also known as the for-case paradigm [2] or Anti-Duff's Device) is a programming antipattern where a clear set of steps is implemented as a switch-within-a-loop. The loop-switch sequence is a specific derivative of spaghetti code .
As such, it was a confusing example that hid the way duff's algorithm actually worked. The central point of this article should be the focus on combinining the switch and loop constructs into 1 entity -- the fact that Duff's code needed to specifically write to a contant Hardware address was secondary.
Hilary Duff hit the red carpet with her 12-year-old son, Luca, in New York City this week. The mother-son duo showed up Dec. 12 for the Broadway opening of "Cult of Love" at Hayes Theater.
In computer science and software engineering, busy-waiting, busy-looping or spinning is a technique in which a process repeatedly checks to see if a condition is true, such as whether keyboard input or a lock is available.
In many cases programs may appear to be hung, but are making slow progress, and waiting a few minutes will allow the task to complete. Modern operating systems provide a mechanism for terminating hung processes, for instance, with the Unix kill command, or through a graphical means such as the Task Manager's "end task" button in Windows (select the particular process in the list and press "end ...