Apple antitrust & music piracy

The position of many folks – most recently the U.S. Department of Justice – against Apple has drawn an unexpected parallel to that of music pirates in the late 90’s and early 2000’s. If you’re too young to have personally lived that time, just know this key point: back then, buying or streaming music online… Read more

A perfect little feature: Universal Clipboard

Apple product photo for Universal Clipboard, showing an iPhone next to a MacBook Pro, with an image selected on the iPhone and 'Copy' highlighted in the pop-up menu, and that same image in a Pages document on the Mac, implying it was just pasted there.

Perhaps in karmic balance of my previous post critical of one of Apple’s APIs, I want to highlight an Apple OS feature that I use every day, that ironically is so simple, obvious, and reliable that I almost never stop to appreciate it. Universal Clipboard basically just means you can copy something on one device… Read more

-fomit-frame-pointer

Explanatory diagram of frame pointers, showing a link from the x86-64 register %rbp to the start of the current frame, which holds the prior value of %rbp that points to the top of the previous frame, and so on.

This is an elaboration of a post I made in a Swift Forums thread, SE-0419: Swift Backtracing API. The question was raised whether an official Swift backtracer should try to support code that doesn’t use frame pointers. Which immediately raised the question – in my mind – of if anyone is still using the “optimisation”… Read more