Julio Merino

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

  • C++ interface to Lua for Kyua

    Finally! After two weeks of holidays work, I have finally been able to submit Kyua's r39: a generic library that implements a C++ interface to Lua. The code is hosted in the utils/lua/ subdirectory. From the revision description:The utils::lua library 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.

    January 8, 2011 · Continue reading (about 2 minutes) · Comments

  • Error handling in Lua

    Some of the methods of the Lua C API can raise errors. To get an initial idea on what these are, take a look at the Functions and Types section and pay attention to the third field of a function description (the one denoted by 'x' in the introduction). Dealing with the errors raised by these functions is tricky, not to say a nightmare. Also, the ridiculously-short documentation on this topic does not help.

    January 7, 2011 · Continue reading (about 6 minutes) · Comments

  • Understanding setjmp/longjmp

    For a long time, I have been aware of the existence of the standard C functions setjmp and longjmp and that they can be used to simulate exceptions in C code. However, it wasn't until yesterday that I had to use them... and it was not trivial. The documentation for these functions tends to be confusing, and understanding them required looking for additional documents and a bit of experimentation. Let's see if this post helps in clarifying how these functions work.

    January 2, 2011 · Continue reading (about 3 minutes) · Comments

  • Happy new year!

    Dear readers, 2011 is here so...Happy new year! I hope you all are having a nice holiday season and enjoyed the new year's eve celebration, should it be something special for you.My tentative resolutions for this year related to non-work and non-personal areas would be:First, to revive this blog. I have been lately posting more frequently than has been usual and it has been a pleasant task. I would like to recover the habit of blogging several times per week and, for that, I need topics!

    January 1, 2011 · Continue reading (about 1 minute) · Comments

  • Using RAII to clean up temporary values from a stack

    For the last couple of days, I have been playing around with the Lua C API and have been writing a thin wrapper library for C++. The main purpose of this auxiliary library is to ensure that global interpreter resources such as the global state or the execution stack are kept consistent in the presence of exceptions — and, in particular, that none of these are leaked due to programming mistakes when handling error codes.

    December 27, 2010 · Continue reading (about 5 minutes) · Comments

  • Dependency injection: simple class constructors

    Following my previous post on dependency injection (DI for short), I wanted to show you today another example of code in which DI helps in making the code clearer and easier to validate. In this case, the person to blame for the original piece of code being criticized is me. The atffile module in ATF provides a class to represent the contents of Atffiles. An Atffile is, basically, a file containing a list of test programs to run and a list of properties associated to these test programs.

    December 26, 2010 · Continue reading (about 4 minutes) · Comments

  • Dependency injection and testing: an example

    A coworker just sent me some Python code for review and, among such code, there was the addition of a function similar to:def PathWithCurrentDate(prefix, now=None): """Extend a path with a year/month/day subdirectory layout. Args: prefix: string, The path to extend with the date subcomponents. now: datetime.date, The date to use for the path; if None, use the current date. Returns: string, The new computed path with the date appended. """

    December 23, 2010 · Continue reading (about 5 minutes) · Comments

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