Ben Hoyt is an experienced software engineer at Canonical. He and his wife and three daughters live in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Visit benhoyt.com → On Hacker News Aug 2016 – Mar 2024
Software Engineering 18Programming Languages 7Systems & Performance 4Web & Frontend 2Society, Policy & Culture 1Security & Privacy 1
How I solved the One Billion Row Challenge (1BRC) in Go nine times, from a simple unoptimised version that takes 1 minute 45 seconds, to an optimised and parallelised version that takes 3.4 seconds.
Performance comparison of counting and sorting word frequencies in various languages (Python, Go, C++, C, AWK, Forth, and Rust)
In 2022, disk I/O is very fast, and not usually the performance bottleneck in programs. This article digs into some numbers.
How I switched hosting my Go-based side projects from Amazon EC2 to Fly.io, significantly simplified deployment, and saved a bit of cash while I was at it.
Shows how much the performance of Go has improved from version 1.2 through to 1.18 -- in its compiler, runtime, and libraries.
An explanation of how to implement a simple hash table data structure, with code and examples in the C programming language.
Why you should escape output correctly, but generally not sanitize user input.
Translating Rob Pike's simple and elegant C regex matcher to Go.
A critical but informative look at the new structural pattern matching feature in Python 3.10, with real-world code examples.
A discussion of the minimal version of Make included in 'The AWK Programming Language', as well as a Python port of the AWK program.
Why and how I added proper CSV support to GoAWK, my POSIX-compatible AWK interpreter.
How I learnt the basics of Go (its good parts as well as a few quirks) by porting a medium-sized web backend from Python.
Describes a simple Markov chain algorithm to generate reasonable-sounding but utterly nonsensical text, and presents some example outputs as well as a Python implementation.
How I wrote GoAWK, how I tested it, and how I measured and improved its performance.
My experience contributing a medium-sized feature (os.scandir) to the Python 3.5 standard library.
Mugo is a single-pass compiler for a tiny subset of the Go programming language -- just enough to compile itself.
A toy (but working) compiler that turns Python syntax into x86-64 assembly using Python's built-in AST module.
A vision for the "small web", small software, and small architectures.
Advice for how to (and how not to) apply for a software engineering job, particularly for the written parts of the interview process. As a bonus, some tips for your resume/CV.
How I learnt Elm (its good parts and bad) by porting a medium-sized web frontend from React.
How I sped up GoAWK by switching from a tree-walking interpreter to a bytecode compiler and virtual machine interpreter.