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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 569 posts.
Jetstream: Shrinking the AT Protocol Firehose by >99%
Jetstream is a streaming service that consumes an AT Proto Sync Firehose and converts it into lightweight, filterable, friendly JSON, allowing us to live tail all posts on Bluesky for as little as ~850 MB/day
Overview of cross-architecture portability problems
Ideally, you’d want your program to work everywhere. Unfortunately, that’s not that simple, even if you’re using high-level “portable” languages such as Python. In thi…
Compiling to Assembly from Scratch
Then come along! Let’s make a compiler that goes all the way from source to assembly from scratch—no shortcuts!
Picking Glibc Versions at Runtime
Using a glibc version that is different from the system-provided one shouldn't require the use of containers, as I recently heard someone claim. Let's take a look at how dynamic linking works and what the options are.
Discord Reduced WebSocket Traffic by 40%
How we rolled out zstandard and other improvements across our gateway cluster to reduce the amount of bandwidth that’s used by our clients.
Optimizing Guile Scheme
Guile is a rather niche language that I love dearly. Guile is a Scheme dialect that features an advanced optimizing bytecode compiler, a JIT compiler, and a modest set of developer tools for inspecting and debugging. Through my time spent developing Chickadee , a game programming library, I have gotten quite familiar…
Linux/4004: booting Linux on Intel 4004 for fun, art, and no profit
Dmitry.GR: Slowly booting full Linux on the intel 4004 for fun, art, and absolutely no profit
DirectX Adopting SPIR-V as the Interchange Format of the Future
Today the Direct3D and HLSL teams are excited to share some insight into the next big step for GPU programmability. Once Shader Model 7 is released,
FreeBSD 13.4-Release
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 13.4-RELEASE. This is the fifth release of the stable/13 branch.
Dissecting the gzip format (2011)
In this article I describe the DEFLATE algorithm that GZIP implements and depends on. The DEFLATE algorithm uses a combination of LZ77, Huffman codes and run-length-encoding; this article describes each in detail by walking through an example and developing source code to implement the algorithm. My aim is to…
Valkey achieved one million RPS 6 months after forking from Redis
Maximize the performance of your hardware with memory access amortization
My 71 TiB ZFS NAS After 10 Years and Zero Drive Failures
My 4U 71 TiB ZFS NAS built with twenty-four 4 TB drives is over 10 years old and still going strong.
Modular Monoliths Are a Good Idea
Microservices aren't the only way to get high cohesion and low coupling.
Porting SBCL to the Nintendo Switch
For the past two years Charles Zhang and I have been working on getting my game engine, Trial, running on the Nintendo Switch. The primary challenge in doing this is porting the underlying Common Lisp runtime to work on this platform. We knew going into this that it was going to be hard, but it has proven to be quite…
Why Oxide Chose Illumos
Servers in the Oxide Rack will form the backbone of both the compute and storage services available to customers. The rack will be composed of a variety of hardware and software components, some of which represent resource-constrained or inflexible environments; e.g., the Service Processor (SP) or Hardware Root Of…
Noisy neighbor detection with eBPF
By Jose Fernandez, Sebastien Dabdoub, Jason Koch, Artem Tkachuk
Rust in illumos
Systems engineering, Rust development, and Unix infrastructure by Till Wegmüller (@toasterson)
A good day to trie-hard: saving compute 1% at a time
Pingora handles 35M+ requests per second, so saving a few microseconds per request can translate to thousands of dollars saved on computing costs. In this post, we share how we freed up over 500 CPU cores by optimizing one function and announce trie-hard, the open source crate that we created to do it.
Windows NT vs. Unix: A design comparison
NT is often touted as a "very advanced" operating system. Why is that? What made NT better than Unix, if anything? And is that still the case?
Exponential Rate Limiting
Following my previous post on rate limiting with GCRA, leaky buckets without the buckets , I reviewed my old notes on rate limiting for Exim . I thought I should do a new write-up of the ideas that I hope will be more broadly interesting.
What is the best pointer tagging method?
In this post, we are going to take a deep dive into pointer tagging, where metadata is encoded into a word-sized pointer. Doing so allows us to keep a compact representation that can be passed around in machine registers. This is very common in implementing dynamic programming languages, but can really be used…
Linux's Bedtime Routine
How does Linux move from an awake machine to a hibernating one? How does it then manage to restore all state? These questions led me to read way too much C in trying to figure out how this particular hardware/software boundary is navigated.
Don't defer Close() on writable files (2017)
It'll bite you some day
WebP: The WebPage Compression Format
I want to provide a smooth experience to my site visitors, so I work on accessibility and ensure it works without JavaScript enabled. I care about page load time because some pages contain large illustrations, so I minify my HTML. But one thing makes turning my blog light as a feather a pain in the ass.
Asynchronous IO: the next billion-dollar mistake?
Asynchronous IO (also known as "non-blocking IO") is a technique applications use to allow performing of many IO operations without blocking the calling OS thread, and without needing to spawn many threads (i.e. one thread per operation). In the late 1990s/early 2000s, an increasing amount of people using the internet…
A Pipeline Made of Airbags
Immutable infrastructure and its tooling has obvious benefits, but the way its current adoption is being done is locking us up in a room whose walls are padded with yaml and we could be losing a lot.
Porting systemd to musl Libc-powered Linux
I have completed an initial new port of systemd to musl. This patch set does not share much in common with the existing OpenEmbedded patchset. I wanted to make a fully updated patch series targetin…