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.
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.