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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,834 posts.
SIMD is a powerful performance technique, and is especially valuable in signal and image processing applications. I will be using it very extensively in my synthesizer, and also it’s increasingly used in xi-editor to optimize string comparisons and similar primitives.
Here is a rough approximation of float multiplication (source): float rough_float_multiply(float a, float b) { constexpr uint32_t bias = 0x3f76d000; return bit_cast<float>(bit_cast<uint32_…
In distributed systems, there’s a common understanding that it is not possible to guarantee exactly-once delivery of messages. What is possible though is exactly-once processing. By adding a unique …
I’ve been going through a period of programming language wanderlust over the past couple months. Recently, I’ve been quite interested in Rust. Coming from Python, I’ve found a lot of Rust’s language features to be quite powerful.
I am generally a fan of Go's approach to concurrency: writing code with goroutines is a lot easier than writing traditional nonblocking network servers in a language like C or C++. However, while working on a highly concurrent network proxy I came across an interesting realization about how the Go concurrency model…
Since the start of the year, the AWS Rust team has been drafting our charter and tenets. Charters and tenets are the framework AWS teams use to define our scope and priorities. The charter tells you what the team does, and the tenets tell you how the team will do it. Since one of our […]
Some of you may know I've been spending whatever time I can scrounge together grinding away at a new serialization library for .NET. Serializers can be complicated beasts. They have to be reliable, flexible, and fast beyond reproach. I won't convince you that serialization libraries have to be quick — in this post…
I recently saw an interesting YouTube video by “Physics for the Birds”. The main video is about matrixes, but he used flags to explain some of the operations on matrixes:
Multi-variable optimization is an incredibly useful tool for writing software. It allows you to specify a desired result and delegate finding the solution to a reliable algorithm. If you know what you want but not how to get it, optimization can probably help. Problems with many interacting variables that are…
Vert.x | Reactive applications on the JVM
Tales of a Software Craftsman
Now they’ve gone an done it. An unidentified agency has spread a potent computer virus across all the world’s computers and deleted the binaries for every copy of every software development tool. Even the offline copies — it’s that potent.
Over the past month, I've implemented from scratch a clean-room version of the UBSan runtime. The initial motivation was the need of developing one for the purposes of catching undefined behavior reports (unspecified code semantics in a compiled executable) in the NetBSD kernel. However, since we need to write a new…
Technical maxims that define Urbit's approach to engineering.
Some readers already know this and a few have suspected. I’ve been working on a new R6RS Scheme compiler for a while. Now I have released it as free software. Read on to learn the many wonderful drawbacks of this niche compiler.
You may have heard of Rust by now. The new programming language that “pursuis the trifecta: safety, concurrency, and speed”. You have to admit, even if you don’t know what trifecta means, it sounds exciting.
Updated May 10, 2021: Hey there friend! This ever-green blog is gold – just like reaktorians. If you’re reading this, you might be one of us. The30th
New features to streamline the interaction between CLI, code editors, and remote databases.
That is the first line of the 80s microcomputer BASIC game The Wizard's Castle initially written for the Exidy Sorcerer platform.
This post is best described as a technology demonstration; it melds together web servers, plugins, WebAssembly, Go, Rust and ABIs. Here's what it shows:
What do you see when you look at this picture? You might simply see an animal. Maybe you see a pet, a dog, or a Golden Retriever. The association between the image and these labels is not hard-wired in to your brain. Instead, you learned the labels after seeing hundreds or thousands of examples. Operating […]
Building resilient services by identifying foreign state mutations and grouping local changes into restartable atomic phases so that every request can be driven to completion.
A progress update on where my Rye Project is today.
Listicles like these do work – not only do they attract attention, if the content is also valuable (and in this case it is, trust me), the article format can be extremely entertaining. This a…
