Welcome to another Friday Q&A, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the programmers are above average. This week, Phil Holland has suggested that I dissect an interesting piece of code from one of my screensavers, so we're going to take a look at ChemicalBurn's multithreaded routing code.

I've just released a new version of ChemicalBurn which fixes two nasty bugs which have been in there for quite some time. Today I'll tell you about them. (You can also follow along at home in the svn repository.)

I'm slowly coming to realize that there isn't always much point in releasing freeware but keeping the source closed. As part of this realization, I have created a publicly accessible Subversion repository and added the source of two of my screensavers, GPULife and ChemicalBurn. They're both MIT licensed and contributions are welcome, although not expected. Maybe one of you can figure out why ChemicalBurn very occasionally gets into a routing loop....

People who know me as a programmer probably know that I am a great hater of C++. As someone who does a lot of Cocoa, this extends naturally into hating Objective-C++. But I made good use of Objective-C++ in ChemicalBurn and I thought I'd share.