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Tavian Barnes

tavianator.com

I’m Tavian, a software developer interested in low-level, high-performance software across many domains. Currently a Staff Engineer at Shopify , I’ve previously worked at the University of Waterloo , Microsoft Research Montreal , a startup called Maluuba , and the University of Calgary .

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Systems & Performance 4Software Engineering 3Tools & Productivity 1Hardware & Electronics 1Databases & Data 1

1

Parallel ./configure

I paid good money for my 24 CPU cores, but ./configure can only manage to use 69% of one of them. As a result, this random project takes about 13.5× longer to configure the build than it does to actually do the build.

2

You could have invented futexes

The futex ( f ast u serspace mu tex ) is a Linux kernel feature designed for synchronization primitives (mutexes, condition variables, semaphores, etc.). Like many topics in concurrency, they have a reputation for being tricky (for example, see the paper Futexes Are Tricky ). Despite that, they really are a…

3

Bfs 3.0: The Fastest Find Yet

bfs is a tool I wrote to do b readth- f irst s earch through a filesystem. It started out simply enough, but over the years it’s grown to include almost every feature from every other find implementation I could find, plus many of its own innovations. The new 3.0 release series includes the biggest new feature so far…