Julio Merino

Software artist. Writer aficionado. Open source enthusiast. Runner. Father of two.
Currently: Senior Software Engineer at Google, New York City.

  • VirtualBox and port forwarding (and Fusion)

    I have been a VMware Fusion user for a long time and I think I am about to be a VirtualBox convert. Let me explain you my story. With the release of the Windows 8 Developer Preview, I felt like giving the system a try. Not because I particularly like or care about Windows, but just because I am genuinely curious about operating systems and wanted to check out their new Metro interface.

    September 19, 2011 · Continue reading (about 4 minutes) · Comments

  • Kyua: Weekly status report (db designdoc edition!)

    Moved the code of utils::lua to a new project, Lutok.Attempted to integrate a copy of Lutok into the Kyua source code to simplify installing Kyua. I have been playing with Subversion externals and Autoconf/Automake hacks to make this happen, but unfortunately haven't got a pleasant solution yet.Modified Lutok to not expose the Lua C API at all from header files and cleaned up the Kyua code to cope with the changes.

    September 18, 2011 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • Name your C++ auto-cleaners

    As you may already know, RAII is a very powerful and popular pattern in the C++ language. With RAII, you can wrap non-stack-managed resources into a stack-managed object such that, when the stack-managed object goes out of scope, it releases the corresponding non-stack-managed object. Smart pointers are just one example of this technique, but so are IO streams too. Before getting into the point of the article, bear with me for a second while I explain what the  stack_cleaner object of Lutok is.

    September 17, 2011 · Continue reading (about 4 minutes) · Comments

  • Introducing Lutok: A lightweight C++ API for Lua

    It has finally happened. Lutok is the result of what was promised in the "Splitting utils::lua from Kyua" web post. Quoting the project web page: Lutok provides thin C++ wrappers around the Lua C API to ease the interaction between C++ and Lua. These wrappers make intensive use of RAII to prevent resource leakage, expose C++-friendly data types, report errors by means of exceptions and ensure that the Lua stack is always left untouched in the face of errors.

    September 15, 2011 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Using va_copy to safely pass ap arguments around

    Update (2014-12-19): The advice provided in this blog post is questionable and, in fact, probably incorrect. The bug described below must have happened for some unrelated reason (like, maybe, reuse of ap), but at this point (three years later!) I do not really remember what was going on here nor have much interest in retrying. A long time ago, while I was preparing an ATF release, I faced many failing tests and crashes in one of the platforms under test.

    September 12, 2011 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

  • Kyua: Weekly status report

    My plan for this week was to release utils::lua as a separate module. Unfortunately, this has not been possible because I've been fighting with legal to clear the name for the project. I don't have an approved name yet, so this will have to wait a bit more :-(On another order of things, I have started writing a design document for the database that will collect test case results and other information.

    September 12, 2011 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • Diversions in Autoconf (actually, in M4sugar)

    Have you ever wondered how Autoconf reorganizes certain parts of your script regardless of the order in which you invoke the macros in your configure.ac script? For example, how come you can define --with-* and --enable-* flags anywhere in your script and these are all magically moved to the option-processing section of the final shell script? After all, Autoconf is just a collection of M4 macros, and a macro preprocessor's only work is to expand macros in the input with predefined output texts.

    September 6, 2011 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

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