Introduction I spend some time in the evenings working on various toy projects. It’s a good way to exercise a programmer brain in a way that a day job generally doesn’t. Anyway, a while back I bought an Analogue Duo, which is a high quality FPGA clone of the old 8/16-bit PC Engine console. I say 8/16 rather than just 16-bit, because while the GPU was 16-bit, the CPU was an 8-bit HuC6280 – a derivative of the legendary 6502 CPU, with a bunch of handy extra instructions and so on.

Introduction One of the first code smells we encounter when working with an object-oriented language where everything is an object, or everything subclasses a common base class, or there are no static methods, is how OOP typically handles equality of objects. For value types such as integers and floating point numbers, it’s not controversial that we should be able to compare them and decide if they’re equal or not. Integers can be compared by bits, and data structures can be compared by descending into the structure and comparing elements.

Introduction If you are gainfully employed as a programmer, you have probably been forced to accept object-oriented programming into your life. When working with a language like Swift or C++ which doesn’t have garbage collection, you will end up in the debugger, trying to locate a strong reference cycle which has resulted in a memory leak. Or, you’re reviewing a Pull Request and notice that there is a cyclic relationship between some classes.