1
There is no memory safety without thread safety
Memory safety is all the rage these days. But what does the term even mean? That turns out to be harder to nail down than you may think. Typically, people use this term to refer to language...
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 11 posts.
2
Zig's New Async I/O
Asynchrony is not concurrency.
3
Beware of Fast-Math
One of my more frequent rants, both online and in person, is the danger posed by the "fast-math" compiler flag. While these rants may elicit resigned acknowledgment from those who already understand the dangers involved, they do little to help those who don't. So given the remarkable paucity of writing on the topic…
4
Carmack on Operating Systems (1997)
I have gotten a significant amount of response on the Quake 2 extension mechanism. I do read everything that comes my way (I can't respond to all of it, though), and I have learned a few things from the mail.
5
How a 20 year old bug in GTA San Andreas surfaced in Windows 11 24H2
After over two decades, players are now forbidden from flying a seaplane, all thanks to undefined code behavior.
6
I use zip bombs to protect my server
The majority of the traffic on the web is from bots. For the most part, these bots are used to discover new content. These are RSS Feed readers, search engines crawling your content, or nowadays AI bo
7
Zig's New Async I/O
In celebration of the std.Io introduction patchset landing today , here is the text version of a short, interactive demo I gave at Zigtoberfest 2025 .
8
SIMD-friendly algorithms for substring searching (2016)
Popular programming languages provide methods or functions which locate a substring in a given string. In C it is the function strstr , the C++ class std::string has the method find , Python's string has methods pos and index , and so on, so forth. All these APIs were designed for one-shot searches . During past…
9
Absurd Workflows: Durable Execution with Just Postgres
Durable execution with just postgres.
10
Jemalloc Postmortem
The jemalloc memory allocator was first conceived in early 2004, and hasbeen in public use for about 20 years now. Thanks to the nature of open source software licensing,jemalloc will remain publicly available indefinitely. But active upstream development has come to anend. This post briefly desc...
11
Turning the database inside-out (2015)
Databases are global, shared, mutable state. That’s the way it has been since the 1960s, and no amount of NoSQL has changed that. However, most self-respecting developers have got rid of mutable global variables in their code long ago. So why do we tolerate databases as they are?