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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 498 posts.

Systems & Performance
2019
362

A fork() in the road

The received wisdom suggests that Unix’s unusual combination of fork() and exec() for process creation was an inspired design. In this paper, we argue that fork was a clever hack for machines and programs of the 1970s that has long outlived its usefulness and is now a liability. We catalog the ways in which fork […]

381

Fibers: An Elegant Windows API

The Windows API — a.k.a. Win32 — is notorious for being clunky, ugly, and lacking good taste. Microsoft has done a pretty commendable job with backwards compatibility, but the trade-off is that the API is filled to the brim with historical cruft. Every hasty, poor design over the decades is carried forward forever…

385

Jepsen: YugaByte DB 1.1.9

2019-04-10: The long fork test used in this analysis contained a bug which caused it to (in many cases) fail to identify long fork anomalies. We have re-checked YugaByte DB 1.1.15.0-b16 with a corrected checker, and its long fork tests still pass.