Developers often blame inefficient loops, database queries or hardware for performance issues. However, while developing a scanner in FreePascal, I discovered a massive bottleneck unrelated to code or hardware: the antivirus. If you are writing applications that need to open thousands of files – even just to read a few …

The other day, I encountered an issue while trying to use Composer with PhpStorm in my local environment. Every time I would try to install or update packages, I would get an error message of the following format: The requested PHP extension xxx is missing from your system. This issue was happening because my local …

As a Windows programmer used to code in Delphi, I must admit I wasn’t ready for how strings are handled in C, the language I’m currently learning. To say the least, it was a shock, and I stumbled upon many issues. Among other things, I couldn’t understand how to use characters outside of the English …

In my C application, I wanted to convert a byte (stored as an unsigned char) into a hexadecimal string. To do so, I wrote the following code: 1char hex[2]; 2unsigned char byte = 10; 3sprintf(hex, "%02X", byte); However, the code produced unreliable results. Moreover, the compiler threw the following warning: …

I’m currently learning C and C++. At the beginning, I wasn’t sure if C++ was merely an extension to C or if they were, despite their shared history, two different languages. A recent issue with the malloc function gave me a deeper insight into this question. As I was working on a C++ project, I wanted to …