Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,390 posts.

Systems & Performance
Any year
3696

Multithreading in modern C++

With the new C++11 Standard, C++ faces the first time challenges of multicore architectures. The 2011 published standard defines how a C++ program has to behave in the presence of multiple threads. The C++11 multithreading capabilities are composed of two components. This is, on the one hand, the defined memory model…

3711

Basics of Futexes

The futex (short for "Fast userspace mutex") mechanism was proposed by Linux contributors from IBM in 2002 [1] ; it was integrated into the kernel in late 2003. The main idea is to enable a more efficient way for userspace code to synchronize multiple threads, with minimal kernel involvement.

3713

URG

If you asked software engineers some of their “least hated” things, you’ll likely hear both UTF-8 and TCP. TCP, despite being 35 years old, is rock-solid, stable infrastructure that we take for granted today; it’s hard to sometimes realize that TCP was man-made, given how well it’s served us. But within every single…

3718

Siren Call of SQLite on the Server

At Terrateam, we are big fans of Fly.io. The service is hosted there and it’s served us well. Just deploy your TOML file, get your infrastructure, do something else with the rest of your day. One of the interesting sides of Fly is that they invest heavily in server-side SQLite. They’ve written a number of blog posts…

3720

Compilers are too smart

Last week I noticed some unexpected assembly code in a function calling std::unordered_map::find (yes, I know, friends don’t let friends use STL, but that is a topic for another discussion). I decided to investigate a bit and it turned out to be quite a journey. It was a Clang compiler, ARM-based platform, I will use…