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How SerenityOS declares ssize_t
This post explores one of my favorite hacks in SerenityOS. I don’t recommend doing this in your codebase, but it has worked for us so far. :^)
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,387 posts.
1412
Near-lossless image formats using ultra-fast LZ codecs
I think simple ultra-high speed lossy (or near-lossless) image codecs, built from the new generation of fast LZ codecs, are going to become ...
1413
Optimizing Open Addressing
Your default hash table should be open-addressed, using Robin Hood linear probing with backward-shift deletion. When prioritizing deterministic performance over memory efficiency, two-way chaining is also a good choice.
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15k inserts/s with Rust and SQLite (2021)
There is this growing sentiment in tech that stacking more and more layers of complexity to reach the sacrosanct "infinite scalability" is not the way forward. First, because it rarely materializes: you need a lot of other things than fancy tech to reach millions of people. Second, because the tradeoffs
1415
The secret life of fsync
Random thoughts on concurrency, databases and…2023124 points62 commentsSystems & Performance details
What kind of durability guarantees fsync system call provides in Linux? Let's find out.
1416
Clocks and Causality – Ordering Events in Distributed Systems (2022)
In distributed systems, logical clocks play a key role in the ordering of system events. What are the various logical clock designs, and how do they help with event ordering? This article answers these questions.
1417
SSD as Long Term Storage Testing
2022 September 10 What is the best media for long term storage is a question that I read frequently from online forums. First and foremost, as far as I’m aware there is no real “set it and forget it” long term storage. In this digital age, data needs to be validated regularly and cycled to a new media every 5-10 years…
1418
Your "simulation" might not need state
The bouncing DVD logo is a fun and easy coding project. Watching Daniel Shiffman code it in p5.js is one of my earliest programming memories. However, the naive solution is far from optimal.
1419
A brief history of APFS (2022)
Born secretly on 27 March 2017, it was Apple’s biggest gamble. Introduced in High Sierra, it didn’t work on Fusion Drives and had other problems. Also explains version numbering.
1420
Parsing the .DS_Store File Format (2018)
About two years ago I came across a .DS_Store file and wanted to extract its information (e.g. file names). After researching the file format and its security implications, as well as writing a parser for it, I would like to share my (limited) knowledge and the parser in Go / Python with the world. You might want to…
1421
Benchmarking Cheap SSDs for Fun, No Profit
The price of Solid-state drives (SSDs) has dropped significantly over the last few years. It's now possible to buy a 1TB solid-state drive for less than €60. However, at such low price points, there is a catch.
1422
Linux is Making Apple Great Again
My personal website and blog
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Understanding Glibc Malloc (2015)
I always got fascinated by heap memory. Questions such as How heap memory is obtained from kernel? How efficiently memory is managed? Is it managed by kernel or by library or by application itself?…
1425
Butler Virtual Operating System
This post introduces [[butler]], a virtual operating system that runs multi-players applications on the web. In two parts, I present:
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Practical Libc-free threading on Linux
Suppose you’re not using a C runtime on Linux, and instead you’re programming against its system call API. It’s long-term and stable after all. Memory management and buffered I/O are easily solved, but a lot of software benefits from concurrency. It would be nice to also have thread spawning capability. This article…
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The Unix process API is unreliable and unsafe (2021)
It is difficult to write software which reliably and safely manages processes on Unix; this is because of flaws in the API. I know of no Unix system which has solved these problems, but in this article I'll be specifically talking about the Linux process API.
1429
The curious case of a memory leak in a Zig program
Digs into a unexpected memory leak when using Zig's FixedBufferAllocator
1430
JDK 20 G1/Parallel/Serial GC Changes
Yet another JDK release that is on track - JDK 20 GA is almost here . Another opportunity to summarize changes and improvements in Hotspot´s stop-the-world garbage collectors for the JDK 20 release.
1431
Using a Mac without a network connection
New version of ViableS runs in a sandbox, with no shared folders, and can now be isolated from networks. So how well does Ventura work without internet?
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Disambiguating Arm, Arm ARM, ARMv9, ARM9, ARM64, AArch64, A64, A78, ...
If you’re new to the Arm ecosystem, consider this a quick primer on terms you likely have seen before but might have questions about.
1434
The Quest for Netflix on Asahi Linux
Note: If you're here because you just want to watch Netflix on Asahi, install this (Edit: for Arch users, grab this . Fedora users can install the widevine-installer package), and then scroll down to the "Netflix-Specific Annoyances" section.
1435
The Basics of Arm64 Assembly
Just one instruction at a time!
1436
How secure is merely discarding (TRIMing) all of a SSD's blocks?
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Possible reasons for 8-bit bytes
Some possible reasons for 8-bit bytes
1438
I spent a week without IPv4 to understand IPv6 transition mechanisms
The time has come to talk about something uncomfortable to a lot of you. You’ve been using legacy methods for far too long. It’s time to move to IPv6. But, of course, there’s a lot more to IPv6 than ‘just’ switching everything over. A lot of systems in the world still haven’t…
1439
Reducing code size in librsvg by removing an unnecessary generic struct
Someone mentioned cargo-bloat the other day and it reminded me that I have been wanting to measure the code size for generic functions in librsvg, and see if there are improvements to be made.
1440
ARM64 Linux Workstation
My personal website and blog