Hi! 👋 I'm Alisa Sireneva ( she/her ), a software developer and blogger from Moscow.
Visit purplesyringa.moe → RSS feedOn Hacker News Aug 2024 – Oct 2026
Software Engineering 11Systems & Performance 8Programming Languages 5Web & Frontend 1Security & Privacy 1Life, Learning & Writing 1
I want to provide a smooth experience to my site visitors, so I work on accessibility and ensure it works without JavaScript enabled. I care about page load time because some pages contain large illustrations, so I minify my HTML. But one thing makes turning my blog light as a feather a pain in the ass.
I’ve been thinking about where I stand in respect to the current state of the industry. This is more of a journal note than a post, apologies for that. I usually leave this stuff private, but I thought I’d post this as a trial in case someone relates to this experience and feels less alone. All opinions are my own.
Demoscene is the art of pushing computers to perform tasks they weren’t designed to handle. One recurring theme in demoscene is the shadow-art animation “Bad Apple!!”. We’ve played it on the Commodore 64, Vectrex (a unique game console utilizing only vector graphics), Impulse Tracker, and even exploited Super Mario…
I have recently done some performance work and realized that reading about my experience could be entertaining. Teaching to think is just as important as teaching to code, but this is seldom done; I think something I’ve done last month is a great opportunity to draw the curtain a bit. serde is the Rust framework for…
I’m not talking about skill, knowledge, or convincing a world focused on radical acceleration that optimization is necessary. Performance optimization is hard because it’s fundamentally a brute-force task, and there’s nothing you can do about it. This post is a bit of a rant on my frustrations with code optimization…
vfmaddrnd231pd is a unique instruction from the FMA instruction set. Most instructions in that set have mnemonics like vfmadd231pd, but here rnd means something very specific. The Intel Software Development Manual documents it as: VFMADDRND231PD – Fused Multiply-Add of Packed Double-Precision Floating-Point Values…
The RAM myth is a belief that modern computer memory resembles perfect random-access memory. Cache is seen as an optimization for small data: if it fits in L2, it’s going to be processed faster; if it doesn’t, there’s nothing we can do. Most likely, you believe that code like this is the fastest way to shard data (I’m…
Everyone knows Wasm is a stack machine. Wikipedia says so, the official Wasm design specification says so, you get it. I thought so too. That is, until I started writing Wasm code – not compiling for Wasm, but writing the instructions by hand. And I found out that there exists a major difference between Wasm and all…
The story goes like this. ComputerCraft is a mod that adds programming to Minecraft. You write Lua code that gets executed by a bespoke interpreter with access to world APIs, and now you’re writing code instead of having fun. Computers have limited disk space, and my /nix folder is growing out of control, so I need to…
Some time ago, I played around with decompiling Java class files in a more efficient manner than traditional solutions like Vineflower allow. Eventually, I wrote an article on my approach to decompiling control flow, which was a great performance boost for my prototype. At the time, I believed that this method can be…
Recently I was scrolling through brson’s Rust quote database and stumbled upon a link to the official Rust tutorial from the very beginning of 2013. It says Rust 0.6 in the corner, but it lists many things that were removed in 0.6, so it’s likely closer to 0.5. I heard tales of old Rust before, but not of how the…
So I was optimizing a domain-specific compressor the other day, as one does. One important problem was chunking the input string and optimally choosing the most compact encoding for each chunk (different encodings compress different characters better, so where to split is not immediately obvious). The previous post…
While I’m taking a short break from low-level programming, here’s a story by a friend of mine, Sonya, about debugging a seemingly impossible bug in ARM code. This bug hunting saga started several months ago. While developing a bare-metal hypervisor on ARM64 for postmarketOS, I hit a strange bug: if I enabled the…
Null pointers look simple on the surface, and that’s why they’re so dangerous. As compiler optimizations, intuitive but incorrect simplifications, and platform-specific quirks have piled on, the odds of making a wrong assumption have increased, leading to the proliferation of bugs and vulnerabilities. This article…
Three months ago, I wrote about why you might want to use panics for error handling. Even though it’s a catchy title, panics are hardly suited for this goal, even if you try to hack around with macros and libraries. The real star is the unwinding mechanism, which powers panics. This post is the first in a series…