The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 14,540 posts.
I want to address a controversy that has gripped the Rust community for the past year or so: the choice by the prominent async “runtimes” to default to multi-threaded executors that perform work-stealing to balance work dynamically among their many tasks. Some Rust users are unhappy with this decision, so unhappy that…
Between the Material You design and move to break apart the Chrome browser from ChromeOS, now more than ever, ChromeOS is Linux with Google's desktop environment.
λm.me - An alternative frontend for Haskell?
This critical role would not be possible without funding from the OpenSSF Alpha-Omega Project. Massive thank-you to Alpha-Omega for investing in the security of the Python ecosystem! Python ...
Minor terminological nitpick. People often describe the LLM as ‘hallucinating’ information whenever it makes up information which seems like it should fit for a given query even when it is trivially false. While evocative, this isn’t actually correct terminology. We already have a perfect word for this precise…
Nikolai Vazquez is a software engineer, designer, and musician.
CRDTs don't have to be all academic papers and math jargon. Learn what CRDTs are and how they work through interactive visualizations and code samples.
Have you ever wondered what lies beneath the surface of an npm package? At its heart, it’s nothing more than a gzipped tarball. Working in software development, source code and binary artifacts are nearly always shipped as .tar.gz or .tgz files. And gzip compression is supported by every HTTP server and web browser…
Earlier this year, I attended CfgMgmtCamp in Ghent and listened to Adam Jacob’s “What if Infrastructure as Code never existed” keynote. Note: I’d like to extend a huge thanks to
A rundown and critique of the NeoHaskell project
Modern extension to classic 2003 article by Joel Spolsky
Memory is a relatively scarce resource on many consumer computers, so a feature to limit how much memory a process uses seems like a good idea, and Microsoft did indeed implement such a feature. Ho…
A post on how I configure ZSH and Emacs in order to use the latter as $EDITOR.
My last article had tips for for arena allocation . This next article demonstrates a technique for building bespoke hash maps that compose nicely with arena allocation. In addition, they’re fast, simple, and automatically scale to any problem that could reasonably be solved with an in-memory hash map. To avoid…
I've had the experience of using GitHub as a maintainer for very large open source projects (1000+ contributors), as an engineer for very large closed source corporate projects, and everything smaller. Through those experiences up to today, GitHub pull requests is where I spend almost all of my time while on GitHub…
This post describes the design and implementation of a runtime benchmark suite for measuring the performance of Rust programs, which was recently added into the Rust compiler suite. I have recently blogged about how the whole benchmark suite works, so feel free to read that post first if you want to gather a bit more…
TL/DR; Play/Download a copy from itch.io I had always wanted to create games. In fact its one of the reasons I went down the development path. For various reasons I never invested enough time …
Mudlark on the River Thames foreshore by day, then hunt vampires at Carfax Abbey by night. A new game written in APL on the Commodore…
More on MMO Architecture:- MMO Architecture: client connections, sockets, threads and connection-oriented servers- MMO Architecture: Optimizing Server Performance with Lockless Queues- MMO Architec…
One fine day in January 2017 I was reminded of something I had half-noticed a few times over the previous decade. That is, younger hackers don’t know the bit structure of ASCII and the meaning of the odder control characters in it.
You probably know how to use async/await. But have you ever wondered how it works under the hood?
This post looks at the Closure Compiler, Google's tool from the mid-2000s for adding types to JavaScript. It looks at how its focus on minification led to very different design choices than TypeScript, and how this and a few other factors led to TypeScript becoming the ubiquitous solution for JavaScript + types. The…
One of the great thing about C are the many fairly mature tools in the ecosystem. The bad news however is that most educational materials don't teach them and thus many beginners (and sometimes even experienced) developers have absolutely no awareness that these tools even exists.
Context Around a year and a half ago, I’ve asked my former company for some time to work on an issue that was impacting the debugging capabilities in our project: gdbserver couldn’t debug multithreaded applications running on a PowerPC32 architecture. The connection to the gdbserver was broken and it couldn’t control…
(New to this series? Consider starting from part 1) At the end of the last post, we started to get some interesting functionality with the ability to resolve addresses to names in a module. This was the last functionality missing before we could implement breakpoints! This part adds the ability for DbgRs to set…
Over the past year I’ve refined my approach to arena allocation . With practice, it’s effective, simple, and fast; typically as easy to use as garbage collection but without the costs. Depending on need, an allocator can weigh just 7–25 lines of code — perfect when lacking a runtime . With the core details of my own…
I was curious to explore how long a program takes to run, how much memory is used over time, and what processes/threads are spawned. To provide answers I wrote a tool, which I named st . Here are a few things I looked into.
I made one of those e-ink weather displays that you see on tech blogs and hacker news sometimes. It can display the current weather, the temperature and precipitation forecast for the rest of the week, and my current and upcoming tasks from Todoist. It's powered by a couple NiMH AA …
Inserting and updating data with a single query.
Introduction Postgres queue tech is a thing of beauty, but far from mainstream. Its relative obscurity is partially attributable to the cargo cult of “scale”. The scalability cult has decreed that there are several queue technologies with greater “scalability” than Postgres, and for that reason alone, Postgres isn’t…
