The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 6,947 posts.
People seem to think that writing a garbage collector is really hard, a deep magic understood by a few great sages and Hans Boehm (et al) . Well it’s not. In fact, it’s rather straight forward. I claim that the hardest part in writing a GC is writing the memory allocator, which is as hard to write as it is to look up…
Building a database in the 2020s
Learn what database sharding is, how sharding works, and some common sharding frameworks and tools.
A metaphor involving parking meters. Over the years, parking meters in town have evolved into a cumbersome, awkward system. Coins are heavy and you need to have them handy, meters need to be reinfo…
Web publication for "PureJaxRL"
One of our Rust services started to show an odd memory profile. This is the story of how we investigated the issue.
In this post, we will discuss the challenges of programming with locks and how the C++ language offers some useful tools to make it easier. We will start with an example in C and then use C++ to improve upon it in steps. The example APIs are based on real-life APIs from the SerenityOS kernel.
This is a very concise introduction to x86 disassembly. It shows that you probably have all the skills to start reading disassembly right now even if you thought it was too complicated for you. It really isn't, see it for yourself.
This post explores one of my favorite hacks in SerenityOS. I don’t recommend doing this in your codebase, but it has worked for us so far. :^)
I think simple ultra-high speed lossy (or near-lossless) image codecs, built from the new generation of fast LZ codecs, are going to become ...
Your default hash table should be open-addressed, using Robin Hood linear probing with backward-shift deletion. When prioritizing deterministic performance over memory efficiency, two-way chaining is also a good choice.
There is this growing sentiment in tech that stacking more and more layers of complexity to reach the sacrosanct "infinite scalability" is not the way forward. First, because it rarely materializes: you need a lot of other things than fancy tech to reach millions of people. Second, because the tradeoffs
Random thoughts on concurrency, databases and…2023124 points62 commentsSystems & Performance details
What kind of durability guarantees fsync system call provides in Linux? Let's find out.
In distributed systems, logical clocks play a key role in the ordering of system events. What are the various logical clock designs, and how do they help with event ordering? This article answers these questions.
2022 September 10 What is the best media for long term storage is a question that I read frequently from online forums. First and foremost, as far as I’m aware there is no real “set it and forget it” long term storage. In this digital age, data needs to be validated regularly and cycled to a new media every 5-10 years…
Neon’s serverless driver redirects the PostgreSQL TCP wire protocol over WebSockets. This makes ordinary, fully-functional PostgreSQL connections accessible from new environments — including serverless platforms like Cloudflare Workers and Vercel Edge Functions. A key feature of these environments is that state is not…
The bouncing DVD logo is a fun and easy coding project. Watching Daniel Shiffman code it in p5.js is one of my earliest programming memories. However, the naive solution is far from optimal.
Born secretly on 27 March 2017, it was Apple’s biggest gamble. Introduced in High Sierra, it didn’t work on Fusion Drives and had other problems. Also explains version numbering.
About two years ago I came across a .DS_Store file and wanted to extract its information (e.g. file names). After researching the file format and its security implications, as well as writing a parser for it, I would like to share my (limited) knowledge and the parser in Go / Python with the world. You might want to…
The price of Solid-state drives (SSDs) has dropped significantly over the last few years. It's now possible to buy a 1TB solid-state drive for less than €60. However, at such low price points, there is a catch.
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I always got fascinated by heap memory. Questions such as How heap memory is obtained from kernel? How efficiently memory is managed? Is it managed by kernel or by library or by application itself?…
AI is powered by a virtuous circle of data, algorithms (“models”), and compute. Growth in one pushes needs in the others and can grossly affect the developer experience on aspects like usability and performance. Today, we have more data and more AI model research than ever before, but compute isn’t scaling at the same…
This post introduces [[butler]], a virtual operating system that runs multi-players applications on the web. In two parts, I present:
Suppose you’re not using a C runtime on Linux, and instead you’re programming against its system call API. It’s long-term and stable after all. Memory management and buffered I/O are easily solved, but a lot of software benefits from concurrency. It would be nice to also have thread spawning capability. This article…
It is difficult to write software which reliably and safely manages processes on Unix; this is because of flaws in the API. I know of no Unix system which has solved these problems, but in this article I'll be specifically talking about the Linux process API.
