The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 553 posts.
When we wrote our assembler we made many design choices that helped us cut down on the complexity of the assembler itself. One of those decisions was to have the assembler directly output executables. That was a good choice in that it allowed us to quickly test as we were developing: once we implemented an opcode, we…
On the whole, LLVM has a well-designed intermediate representation (IR), which is specified in the language reference . However, there are a number of areas where design mistakes have been made. And while the LLVM project is generally open to addressing such issues, mistakes in core IR design tend to be firmly…
Since the launch of Chrome in 2008, speed has been one of the 4 core principles that shape the work we do to deliver a highly performant br...
I’ve been a NetBSD developer for three years and it’s been my primary operating system for a long time too - on everything: routers, laptops, Raspberry Pis, PowerPC mac minis, Vortex86 embedded boards, and servers.
The detailed story of how to build a vector-based storage model from scratch.
Since I work a lot with clustered VMs , I’ve ended up spending a lot of time trying to figure out how DNS lookups work. I applied ‘fixes’ to my problems from StackOverflow without really understanding why they work (or don’t work) for some time.
Peripheral component interconnect express (PCIe) hardware continues to push the boundaries of computing thanks to advances in transfer speeds, the number of available lanes for simultaneous data de…
I got the chance to investigate an interesting bug in SerenityOS this week. It was related to the decoding of JPG images in the operating system. For some reason, when a JPG image is viewed, it comes out like this: Lenna, showing up with incorrect colors. Weird, huh? Also seems like a simple confusion of RGB vs. BGR…
Discover how ZFS rapidly gained popularity from its inception at Sun, leading to the rise of OpenZFS. Learn about its journey in the second part of our series.
In the late 1990s, the Windows Shell and Internet Explorer teams introduced a bunch of brilliant and intricate designs that allowed extension of the shell and the browser to handle scenarios beyond…
When coding a webpage, sometimes you know something is very likely to be needed, even if it's not needed yet. You can give the browser a hint: <link rel=prefetch href=url> The browser will take a note, and then when it doesn't have anything more important to do it might request url. Later on, if it does turn out…
(With a caveat: I'm compiling the ARMv8 64-bit Pi OS kernel.) It seems every week or so on Hacker News, a story hits the front page showing some new benchmark and how one of the new M1-based Macs matches or beats the higher-priced competition in some specific benchmark—be it GeekBench, X86-specific code, or building…
How to put a price on the limits of knowledge
The Apple M1 available in the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro 13", and Mac Mini has been the focus of a ton of benchmarking writeups and blog posts about the new chip. The performance overall, and especially performance/watt, that Apple has achieved with the chip is very impressive. As a ray tracing person, what caught my…
I have reached a good milestone on the SCAMP hardware: it can now execute code! It runs all the way through the test program correctly.
QUIC version 1 is officially formalized, and QUIC deployments will now move away from using temporary draft versions to the newly minted version 1.
In V8 v9.1 we’re improving V8 performance by 5–15% with Sparkplug: a new, non-optimizing JavaScript compiler.
And why you should too!
A whirlwind tour through the bucket-load of fail that is Urbit.
We performed experiments to find out how different Linux system calls perform for available devices.
I usually write about security features or techniques on Windows. But today’s blog is not directly related to any security topics, other than the usual added risk that any new system call introduces. However, it’s an interesting addition to the I/O world in Windows that could be useful for developers and I thought it…
This has been on my mind for a while, and with a couple of things lately stoking my ire (the NFT resurgence, and Signal integrating MobileCoin), I’ve finally pushed myself to put it into words.
At RIPE 81, a group of enthusiastic researchers and practitioners from industry and academia discussed with the RIPE community what role RIRs and LIRs could take on in the SCION next-generation Internet architecture. More than 80 BoF participants discussed this question, wanting to learn more about…
Recently I’ve been rambling about the amazing improvements which will land with C++20 support in our toolchains. For those who haven’t had a look at those yet, I recommend checking out the summary in the following recent blog post: C++20: An Introduction. The Update We’ve All Been Waiting For? .
