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How JavaScript works: inside the V8 engine
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The ‘here is’ key
The Lear Siegler ADM-3A terminal is a very important artefact in computing history.
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The Hardest Program I've Ever Written (2015)
The hardest program I’ve ever written, once you strip out the whitespace, is 3,835 lines long. That handful of code took me almost a year to write. Granted, that doesn’t take into account the code that didn’t make it. The commit history shows that I deleted 20,704 lines of code over that time. Every surviving line has…
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Rise and fall of JVM languages
Every now and then, there’s a post predicting the death of the Java language. The funny thing is that none of them writes about a date. But to be honest, they are all probably true. This is the fate of every language: to disappear into oblivion - or more precisely to be used less and less for new projects.
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Async/Await will make code simpler
Or How I Learned to Stop Writing Callback Functions and Love Javascript ES8.
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Firefox 55 and Selenium IDE
The bad news: from Firefox 55 onwards, Selenium IDE will no longer work. The reasons for this are complex, but boil down to two main causes: Browsers are complicated pieces of software that are con…
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A Tutorial on Portable Makefiles
In my first decade writing Makefiles, I developed the bad habit of liberally using GNU Make’s extensions. I didn’t know the line between GNU Make and the portable features guaranteed by POSIX. Usually it didn’t matter much, but it would become an annoyance when building on non-Linux systems, such as on the various…
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Postgres geography type is not limited to Earth
It's a little known fact that the PostGIS geography type since PostGIS 2.2 (well was introduced in 2.1 I think but had a bug in it until 2.1.4 or so), supports any spheroidal spatial reference system that measures in degrees. When an srid is not specified, it defaults to using 4326, Earth WGS 84 long lat.
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IOCCC Flight Simulator
The IOCCC Flight Simulator was the winning entry in the 1998 International Obfuscated C Code Contest. It is a flight simulator in under 2 kilobytes of code, complete with relatively accurate 6-degree-of-freedom dynamics, loadable wireframe scenery, and a small instrument panel.
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Ideal OS: Rebooting the Desktop Operating System
Twitter user ekse has graciously translated this blog to Chinese. Thanks! TL;DR: By the end of this essay I hope to convince you of the following facts. First, that modern desktop operating systems are anything but. They are bloated, slow, and layered with legacy cruft that still functions only thanks to Moore's Law…
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Diaspora version 0.7.0.0 released
August 27th marks five years since diaspora*, the open, privacy-oriented social network, was placed into the hands of its community by its founders. One year ago the community released diaspora* version 0.6, the result of a huge effort of refactoring the old code to make it perform better, as well as redesigning…
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Why I'm not a React Native developer
Many people are currently assessing React Native as a platform to develop their next mobile app on. This is no trivial matter. Switching your software development platform involves a high setup cost and will profoundly impact your daily programming workflow. It is also one of the costliest decisions to reverse after…
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Towards a JavaScript Binary AST
In this blog post, I would like to introduce the JavaScript Binary AST, an ongoing project that we hope will help make webpages load faster, along with a number of other benefits. A little background Over the years, JavaScript has grown from one of the slowest scripting languages available to a high-performance…
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Why Elixir (2014)
It’s been about a year since I’ve started using Elixir. Originally, I intended to use the language only for blogging purposes, thinking it could help me better illustrate benefits of Erlang Virtual Machine (EVM). However, I was immediately fascinated with what the language brings to the table, and very quickly…
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Elixir in Depth – Reading and personal notes
Elixir is a hot and trendy topic nowadays. Of the newer languages that show up periodically on Hacker News, I found t...
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A programming language from scratch: 3 steps to an interpreter
A little while ago I wrote about 16bitjs, a 16 bit virtual machine written in javascript. It implemented a custom CPU architecture and assembly language, assembler, and debugger. I had the thought …
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Casually removing root files
You’re walking at $HOME, minding your own business. $ whoami > user $ pwd > /home/user But something is bothering your feet. It’s like if a little rock has fallen into your shoe. You take it off, to see what’s going on. $ ls -lah ./left-shoe ---------- 1 root root 4 May 30 13:20 little-rock That’s odd. It’s there, but…
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How Postgres Makes Transactions Atomic
A dive into the mechanics that allow Postgres to provide strong atomic guarantees despite the chaotic entropy of production.
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Understanding the math behind 0x5f3759df and the fast inverse square root (2012)
This post is about the magic constant 0x5f3759df and an extremely neat hack, fast inverse square root, which is where the constant comes from.
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On Melissa O’Neill’s PCG random number generator
Computers often need random numbers. Most times, random numbers are not actually random... in the sense that they are the output of a mathematical function that is purely deterministic. And it is not even entirely clear what "really random" would mean. It is not clear that we live in a randomized universe... it seems…
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Teaching an AI to play a simple game using Q-learning
In this post I will walk you through how to teach a computer to master a simple video game using the q-learning reinforcement learning algorithm. We will implement the algorithm from scratch in Ruby without the use of external gems. To enable us to illustrate the inner workings of the algorithm we will be teaching […]
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Rustgo: Calling Rust from Go with near-zero overhead
Go has good support for calling into assembly, and a lot of the fast cryptographic code in the stdlib is carefully optimized assembly, bringing speedups of over 20 times.