Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 2,560 posts.

Systems & Performance
Any year
938

Memory Safe Context Switching

This document describes how Fil-C supports longjmp , setjmp , setcontext , getcontext , makecontext , and swapcontext in a totally memory-safe way. In particular, no misuse of those APIs in Fil-C can lead to stack corruption or any other violation of Fil-C's capability model.

951

Swift Atomics

I’m delighted to announce Swift Atomics, a new open source package that enables direct use of low-level atomic operations in Swift code. The goal of this library is to enable intrepid systems programmers to start building synchronization constructs (such as concurrent data structures) directly in Swift.

956

On mutex performance and WTF::Lock

One of the things I’ve been doing this quarter is removing Gecko’s dependence on NSPR locks . Gecko’s (non-recursive) mutexes and condition variables now use platform-specific constructs, rather than indirecting through NSPR. This change makes things smaller, especially on POSIX platforms, and uses no dynamic memory…