The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,389 posts.
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…
Matt Jacobson, recovering software engineer.
The computers are fast but you don't know it: Speeding up your Python functions with Cython & C++
telegra.ph/no-questdb-is-not-faster-than-clickhouse-06-152022144 points63 commentscited by 3Databases & Data details
QuestDB created a minor stir in the small but active world of analytics database benchmarking with this blog article: https://questdb.io/blog/2022/05/26/query-benchmark-questdb-versus-clickhouse-timescale. This is the money quote: “QuestDB is an order of magnitude faster than both TimescaleDB and ClickHouse in this…
The UNIX fork() system call seems like an elegant way to process tasks in parallel. It creates a copy of the current process, allowing tasks to read the same memory, without needing fine-grained synchronization. Unfortunately, you need to use it extremely carefully in large programs because fork in a multi-threaded…
I’ve enjoyed writing software for 40+ years now. Lots of activities fall into that “writing software” basket, and here’s my favorite: When you have a body of code with a decent unit-test suite and you need to make it go faster. This part of the Quamina diary is a case study of making a piece of the library faster.
While investigating the aftermath of a potential security breach, I came across a somewhat "odd" process looking like this:
In this post I explain a little about how to use Java’s Vector APIs, attempt to explain how they turn out fast, and then use them to implement a sorting algorithm 3x faster than Arrays.sort . I then explain some problems I found, and how I resolved them. Supporting code is published here .
This post is the fourth part of a three-part series 1 describing work that I have been doing to improve the Cranelift compiler. In this post, I'll describe the work that went into regalloc2 , a new register allocator I developed over the past year. The allocator started as an effort to port IonMonkey's register…
In 1988, the anthropologist Joseph Tainter published a book called The Collapse of Complex Societies. In it, he described the rise and fall of great…
When I started thinking about writing a post about web font loading my intention was to propose relatively sophisticated ideas that I've...
OpenBSD's share/misc/airport file and a day trip to Lublin
I really wanted to make this article short … but I failed miserably. At least I tried to organize it well so one may get back to it after ‘some’ reading because its not a short le…
Yesterday, Apple did release RosettaLinux as part of the macOS Ventura preview. Let’s take a first quick look…
The OS/2 Museum has made available the first version of a display driver disk for Windows 9x running on VirtualBox . The driver uses a linear framebuffer and supports 8/16/24/32bpp modes with resolutions up to 1920×1200 pixels (see more below). The driver is not accelerated but tends to be very speedy on modern…
Linked lists are often overused in introductory algorithmics courses, due to a heavy focus on theorical complexities. Unfortunatly, in practice, computers are complex beasts. They don’t execute instructions sequentially 1 with the same cost 2 . This means that a data structure with faster theorical complexities does…
I unlocked Hypervisor.framework on my jailbroken phone and modified UTM, a popular QEMU port for iOS, to run arm64 Linux in a VM at full native speed. …for the clickbait - and to show iPhone’s untapped potential.
Fallacies of distributed systems are a set of assertions made by L Peter Deutsch and others at Sun Microsystems describing false assumptions that programmers new to distributed applications invariably make.
A large C++ codebase meets a new linker: The good, the bad and the performance improvements <a class="more-link" href="https://www.productive-cpp.com/using-the-mold-linker-for-fun-and-3x-8x-link-time-speedups/">... Read More</a>
Pipes are ubiquitous in Unix --- but how fast can they go on Linux? In this post we'll iteratively improve a simple pipe-writing benchmark from 3.5GiB/s to 65GiB/s, guided by Linux `perf`.
Let's start at the beginning: it all started with me trying to boot a system which receives its initial ramdisk over XMODEM.
Floodgap has had a T1 line since I moved into this house in 2011. I'm one of those weirdos who runs my own hardware and prefers to avoid ...
The Threading library Starting in Emacs 26 some very ambitious changes were added. Basic thread support was enabled, laying the groundwork for a future concurrent emacs. The docs layout this possibility: Emacs Lisp provides a limited form of concurrency, called threads. All the threads in a given instance of Emacs…
Many recent Intel processors benefit from a new family of instructions called AVX-512. These instructions operate over wide registers (up to 512 bits) and follow the Single instruction, multiple data (SIMD) paradigm. These new AVX-512 instructions allow you to break some speed records, such as decoding base64 data at…
Fuchsia is a general-purpose open-source operating system created by Google. It is based on the Zircon microkernel written in C++ and is currently under active development. The developers say that Fuchsia is designed with a focus on security, updatability, and performance. As a Linux kernel hacker, I decided to take a…
As far as FreeBSD is concerned, Graviton 3 is mostly just a faster version of the Graviton 2: Most things "just work", and the things which don't work on Graviton 2 — hotplug devices and cleanly shutting down an instance via the EC2 API — also don't work on Graviton 3. (Want to help get these fixed? Sponsor my work on…
