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Fast Allocations in Ruby 3.5
Many Ruby applications allocate objects. What if we could make allocating objects six times faster? We can! Read on to learn more!
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,943 posts.
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Improving performance of rav1d video decoder
*on macOS with an M3 chip *slightly more than 1%, on a specific benchmark, without any new unsafe code A while ago, memorysafety.org announced a contest for …
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The Windows Subsystem for Linux is now open source
Today we’re very excited to announce the open-source release of the Windows Subsystem for Linux. This is the result of a multiyear effort to prepare for this, and a great closure to the first ever issue raised on the Microsoft/WSL repo:
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Understanding the Go Scheduler
Go Scheduler
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Ground control to Major Trial
When a $130M aerospace company chooses to endlessly abuse free trials instead of typing git pull, you start to question gravity, or at least common sense.
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The current state of TLA⁺ development
The 2025 TLA⁺ Community Event was held last week on May 4th at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. It was a satellite event to ETAPS 2025, which I also attended, and plan to write about in the near future. I gave a talk somewhat-hucksterishly titled It’s never been easier to write TLA⁺ tooling! which I…
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A server that wasn't meant to exist
A story from 16 years ago - trust, tech, and a server that had to disappear. They offered me a blank check. I said no.
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Lock-Free Rust: How to Build a Rollercoaster While It's on Fire
A joyride through the dangers of lock-free programming.
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Rustls Server-Side Performance
In past years, the Rustls project has been happy to receive substantial investments from the ISRG. One of our goals has been to improve performance without compromising on safety. We last posted about our performance improvements in October of 2024, and we're back to talk about another round of improvements. What is…
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Working on complex systems: What I learned working at Google
This is why recognizing whether a system is complicated or complex is so important: it shapes how we should approach problem-solving.
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RIP Usenix ATC
USENIX made the decision this week to discontinue its flagship Annual Technical Conference . When USENIX was started in 1975 — before the Internet, really — conferences were the fastest vector for practitioners to formally share their ideas, and USENIX ATC flourished. Speaking for myself, I came up lionizing ATC: I…
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Reverse engineering the 386 processor's prefetch queue circuitry
In 1985, Intel introduced the groundbreaking 386 processor, the first 32-bit processor in the x86 architecture. To improve performance, the ...
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Comparison of C/POSIX standard library implementations for Linux
The table below and notes which follow are a comparison of some of the different standard library implementations available for Linux, with a particular focus on the balance between feature-richness and bloat. I have tried to be fair and objective, but as I am the author of musl , that may have influenced my choice of…
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The Beam
In Lorena's latest instalment, learn about the foundations of Elixir's power and reliability with the Erlang Virtual Machine (BEAM).
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21 GB/s CSV Parsing Using SIMD on AMD 9950X
Sep 0.10.0 was released April 22nd, 2025 with optimizations for AVX-512 capable CPUs like the AMD 9950X (Zen 5) and updated benchmarks including the 9950X. Sep now achieves a staggering 21 GB/s on the 9950X for the low-level CSV parsing. 🚀 Before 0.10.0, Sep achieved ~18 GB/s on 9950X.
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Implementing a Struct of Arrays
My CppCon 2025 talk, Practical Reflection, is now online, and goes over this example in more detail and more digressions. Check it out!
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Replacing Kubernetes with systemd (2024)
In this post I go through the journey of overusing Kubernetes and how systemd can actually do most of what I use it for.
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Load-Store Conflicts
meshoptimizer implements several geometry compression algorithms that are designed to take advantage of redundancies common in mesh data and decompress quickly - targeting many gigabytes per second in decoding throughput. One of them, index decoder, has seen a significant and unexpected variance in performance across…
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Building Burstables: CPU slicing with cgroups
Burstable VMs run on a fraction of CPU and burst to a higher level of CPU usage to support occasional usage spikes. To implement them, we leveraged Control Groups v2 (cgroups v2), a Linux kernel feature that helps manage resource usage. We thought our open-source implementation of burstable VMs might be interesting…
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Strings Just Got Faster
In JDK 25, Strings used as keys in immutable Maps can be much faster.
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Linux Kernel Exploitation: Attack of the Vsock
What started off as casual scrolling through the KernelCTF submissions quickly spiraled into a weeks-long deep dive into a deceptively simple patch - and my first root shell from a Linux kernel exploit!
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Path Isn't Real on Linux
where my words occasionally escape /dev/null
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Jepsen: Amazon RDS for PostgreSQL 17.4
AWS’s Sergey Melnik, along with HN commenters matashii and Ants Aasma, have identified the cause of Long Fork in PostgreSQL clusters. As described a 2013 mailing list post , the order in which a PostgreSQL primary makes transactions visible is determined by an in-memory lock. Secondaries, however, make transactions…
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Performance optimization is hard because it's fundamentally a brute-force task
I’m not talking about skill, knowledge, or convincing a world focused on radical acceleration that optimization is necessary. Performance optimization is hard because it’s fundamentally a brute-force task, and there’s nothing you can do about it. This post is a bit of a rant on my frustrations with code optimization…
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Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?
It's waiting for Godot and eventually gives up.
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I use zip bombs to protect my server
The majority of the traffic on the web is from bots. For the most part, these bots are used to discover new content. These are RSS Feed readers, search engines crawling your content, or nowadays AI bo