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How to use a Python multiprocessing module
Working with Python multiprocessing module can be difficult at times. Learn what you can do with it.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,733 posts.
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SQLite builds for WASI since 3.41.0
A short recap of how SQLite now has a WASI build
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TypeScript team released an explorer for performance tuning
Over the past few months, during the lead-up to the TypeScript 5.0 beta, our team spent a good portion of our time looking for ways to improve the
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Implementing Mario's Stack Blur 15 times in C++ (with tests and benchmarks)
Implementing Mario Klingemann's Stack Blur algorithm in C++ 15 ways, with tests and benchmarks, to build fast CPU drop shadows for JUCE.
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Automating Dead Code Cleanup
Meta’s Systematic Code and Asset Removal Framework (SCARF) has a subsystem for identifying and removing dead code. SCARF combines static and dynamic analysis of programs to detect dead code from bo…
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Understanding Glibc Malloc (2015)
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?…
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Rep and Ren: A new approach to CLI find, replace, and renaming
This post is about two new command-line utilities: rep and ren. Both are available on GitHub.
1599
Making GHC faster at emitting code (2022)
How we gained 2–3% improvements in compile times by making GHC better at printing code.
1600
Bit Hacking (with Go code)
At a fundamental level, a programmer needs to manipulate bits. Modern processors operate over data by loading in 'registers' and not individual bits. Thus a programmer must know how to manipulate the bits within a register. Generally, we can do so while programming with 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit and 64-bit integers. For…
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Development slowness in big and legacy applications
Software companies come in many sizes. There are small startups, medium-sized companies, and huge enterprises. As you might expect, startups are usually lean and fast. Big companies that develop large applications move much more slowly. Those might be systems developed for many years or decades by hundreds of…
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Transcoding Unicode with AVX-512: AMD Zen 4 vs. Intel Ice Lake
Most systems today rely on Unicode strings. However, we have two popular Unicode formats: UTF-8 and UTF-16. We often need to convert from one format to the other. For example, you might have a database formatted with UTF-16, but you need to produce JSON documents using UTF-8. This conversion is often called…
1603
Top-Down LR Parsing
This semester, I am teaching Compilers , and I'm quite happy with how I covered parsing this year. Specifically, I taught students to build a top-down LR parser and it seemed to go relatively well.
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Full-text search engine with PostgreSQL (part 2): Postgres vs. Elasticsearch
Using PostgreSQL as a full-text search engine is tempting because it requires less infrastructure. But is its set of search-related features enough to compete with the Lucene based alternatives?
1605
Recreating ANSI Art from a Screenshot
In the early to mid-90s, I ran a BBS out of my bedroom. It wasn’t very popular, but I did have a lot of time on my hands and I spent a lot of that time modding it. Initially, I wrote mods for myself, but eventually I started releasing them to other people. As a teenager, this was the first software that I wrote that…
1606
Rust to Assembly: Understanding the Inner Workings of Rust
How Rust compiles to assembly: enum memory layout, smart pointers, static vs dynamic dispatch, vtables, closures, vector iteration and async state machines.
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NixOS and my descent into insanity
As I tend to do, I picked a topic to write about that is much larger in scope than I could manage in a reasonable amount of time. Did I learn? Apparently...
1608
Using Emacs as $EDITOR
A post on how I configure ZSH and Emacs in order to use the latter as $EDITOR.
1609
Tag Systems
I've tried to write a blog post on tag systems for years now. Literally years, I think I first started drafting it out in 2018 or so? The problem is that...
1610
Ruby's private keyword is weird
Ruby's `private` keyword means something different compared to basically all other object-oriented languages. Most other languages don't even have a feature matching what Ruby calls `private`, but incredibly, Scala does, which it calls `protected[this]` (meaning
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Make your CLI demos a breeze with zero stress and zero mistakes
<p> Running live demos can be stressful. You know what you want to say and show. You prepare the CLI commands you want to run to best showcase what you...
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Why checked exceptions failed
Programming language features are never orthogonal.
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I stopped worrying and learned to love denormalized tables
Glean is the Enterprise AI platform connected to your enterprise's data. Find, create, and automate anything. Explore what Glean can do for you!
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Compiling Typed Python
With a little effort, you can make your mypy-typed Python go zoom.
1617
Designing a new concurrent data structure
How to design a lock-free data structure? A detective story for curious developers.
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Practical comparison of ARM compilers
My inspiration for this article was this thread in r/embedded . There are still many myths and misconception when it comes to the simple questions "Which compiler should I use?" or "Which compiler is the best?". I will try to share my practical experience with GCC, Clang and IAR on Cortex-M ( and Cortex-M only ). This…
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Animations From First Principles (in 5 minutes)
Create animations from first principles and morph between different figures with Python. In 5 minutes. Kind of.
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Draculark: Mudlarking and vampire hunting game in APL for the Commodore SuperPET
Mudlark on the River Thames foreshore by day, then hunt vampires at Carfax Abbey by night. A new game written in APL on the Commodore…