It is not uncommon to meet people in real life who know this blog. Just the other day I got to talking to someone who had overheard me discussing some compiler thing with a colleague and asked if they knew mcyoung.xyz , and when they said the recent Go articles were pretty cool, I mentioned it was my blog.
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Another explainer on a fun, esoteric topic: optimizing code with SIMD (single instruction multiple data, also sometimes called vectorization ). Designing a good, fast, portable SIMD algorithm is not a simple matter and requires thinking a little bit like a circuit designer.
I will often say that the so-called “C ABI” is a very bad one, and a relatively unimaginative one when it comes to passing complicated types effectively. A lot of people ask me “ok, what would you use instead”, and I just point them to the Go register ABI , but it seems most people have trouble filling in the gaps of…
Historically I have worked on many projects related to high-performance Protobuf, be that on the C++ runtime, on the Rust runtime, or on integrating UPB , the fastest Protobuf runtime, written by my colleague Josh Haberman . I generally don’t post directly about my current job, but my most recent toy-turned-product is…
If you’ve read anything about compilers in the last two decades or so, you have almost certainly heard of SSA compilers , a popular architecture featured in many optimizing compilers, including ahead-of-time compilers such as LLVM, GCC, Go, CUDA (and various shader compilers), Swift 1 , and MSVC 2 , and just-in-time…
I’m not really one to brag publicly about expensive toys, but a few weeks ago I managed to get one that’s really something special. It is a Curta Type II , a mechanical digital 1 calculator manufactured in Liechtenstein between the 50s and 70s, before solid-state calculators killed them and the likes of slide-rules.
I write compilers for fun. I can’t help it. Consequently, I also write a lot of parsers. In systems programming, it’s usually a good idea to try to share memory rather than reuse it, so as such my AST types tend to look like this.
Even though I am a C++ programmer at heart, Go fascinates me for none of the reasons you think. Go has made several interesting design decisions:
Cross-compiling is taking a computer program and compiling it for a machine that isn’t the one hosting the compilation. Although historically compilers would only compile for the host machine, this is considered an anachronism: all serious native compilers are now cross-compilers.
Low level software usually has lots of .cc or .rs files. Even lower-level software, like your cryptography library, probably has .S containing assembly, my least favorite language for code review.