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What's bad about Julia?
A mega-rant about all the things I find bad about Julia.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 14,541 posts.
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Finding Windows HANDLE leaks, in Chromium and others
Three years ago I found a 32 GB memory leak caused by CcmExec.exe failing to close process handles. That bug is fixed, but ever since then I have had the handles column in Windows Task Manager ena…
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Understanding Rust futures by going way too deep
So! Rust futures! Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Until it’s not. So let’s do the easy thing, and then instead of waiting for the hard thing to sneak up on us, we’ll go for it intentionally. That’s all-a...
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Heuristics for Effective Software Development: A continuously evolving list
Without psychological safety, respect, and trust, none of the following is possible. The way we work, the work we do, and the organizations within which we work are all part of a connected system. You cannot change anything without changing everything. You cannot improve a system by tinkering with the parts. Process…
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Inserting 130M SQLite rows per minute from a scripting language
The other week, I stumbled on the post Inserting One Billion Rows in SQLite Under A Minute , which was a funny coincidence, as I was just in...
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Fun with Unix domain sockets
A small enhancement to Datasette this week: I’ve added support for proxying via Unix domain sockets. This started out as a feature request from Aslak Raanes: #1388: Serve using UNIX …
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Modern C++ for C Programmers (2018)
Welcome to part 1 of Modern C++ for C Programmers, please see the introduction for the goals and context of this series. In this part we start with C++ features that you can use to spice up your code ’line by line’, without immediately having to use all 1400 pages of ‘The C++ Programming Language’. Various code…
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Most URLs are syntactically valid JavaScript code
Further adventures in JavaScript
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How to exfiltrate code from Bitbucket
Every year or so, something compels me to start over with a fresh OS image. Most recently, that something was an unfortunate water bottle incident. Once again, I need to pull down my digital life from the internet. The code and assets for this blog currently live in a 500 MB Git repository, which was hosted on…
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Worse Is Better (2001)
The concept known as "worse is better" holds that in software making (and perhaps in other arenas as well) it is better to start with a minimal creation and grow it as needed. Christopher Alexander might call this "piecemeal growth." This is the story of the evolution of that concept.
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Namedtuple in a Post-Dataclasses World
namedtuple has been around since forever, and over time, its convenience saw it used far outside its originally intended purpose. With dataclasses now covering part of those use cases, what should one use named tuples for? In this article, I address this question, and give a few examples from real code.
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0x7FDE623822FC16E6: A magic constant for double float reciprocal (2011)
EDIT: I never expected this post to garner so much interest. Just to be clear, using the constant is a very bad idea in almost every situation I can think of. Even instructions like RCPSS should only be used by people who are convinced that the tradeoffs are worth it (or don’t have any other choice). Subtracting from…
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Useful algorithms that are not optimized by Jax, PyTorch, or TensorFlow
In some previous blog posts we described in details how one can generalize automatic differentiation to give automatically stability enhancements and all sorts of other niceties by incorporating graph transformations into code generation. However, one of the things which we didn’t go into too much is the limitation of…
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A monorepo misconception – atomic cross-project commits
Are cross-project changes in a single atomic commit the key advantage of monorepos? I do not think so.
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Julia's multiple dispatch explained with Pokemons
T hese days, I find myself evangelizing for Julia quite a bit. It’s a good language, especially for scientific computing, but I believe its focus on performance also makes it a good general language as well. At some level, programmers who know multiple languages have an abstract understanding of the constructs used…
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Clojure builds as an amalgamation of orthogonal parts
The Clojure Core team recently released a new Clojure library, tools.build , that is a culmination of thought around batteries-included build support for Clojure projects. I won’t go into detail around the history and contents of the library in this post because much of that is found elsewhere, including the…
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Software engineering research is a train wreck
I'm a big advocate of Empirical Software Engineering. I wrote a talk on it. I wrote a 6000-word post covering one controversy. I spend a lot of time reading...
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Papers every developer should read at least twice (2009)
10 Papers Every Developer Should Read - (At Least Twice)
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JVM Anatomy Quark #26: Identity Hash Code
"JVM Anatomy Quarks" is the on-going mini-post series, where every post is describing some elementary piece of knowledge about JVM. The name underlines the fact that the single post cannot be taken in isolation, and most pieces described here are going to readily interact with each other.
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GitHub Copilot: First Impressions
A glimpse of the upcoming paradigm shift in how we do development
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Paxos vs. Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus?
In our 54th reading group meeting, we were looking for an answer to an important question in the distributed systems community: “What about Raft?” We looked at the “ Paxos vs Raft: Have we reached consensus on distributed consensus? ” paper to try to find the answer. As always, we had an excellent presentation, this…
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Zig, Skia, Clojure, Geometry and the Japanese TV Show: ICFP Contest 2021
4-day coding marathon
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macOS Nix setup: an alternative to Homebrew (2020)
I recently got a new Macbook, and began setting up the Nix package manager to install my developer toolset. I mainly did this to try and have a working setup without installing Homebrew. Since I ran into a few issues, I wanted to briefly document what I did and why in case others wanted to try the same. Why Nix? (and…
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Thinking in Events: From Databases to Distributed Collaboration Software [video]
Keynote at 15th ACM International Conference on Distributed and Event-based Systems (DEBS) , Online (originally planned to be in Milan, Italy), July 2021.
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Use the 'tail' command to monitor everything
This article is about how to use the 'tail' command. Here is an overview of how you can use the 'head' and 'tail' commands to output different parts of a file: