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Blocking code is a leaky abstraction
Asynchronous code does not require the rest of your code to be asynchronous. I can’t say the same for blocking code.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 399 posts.
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Rust in illumos
Systems engineering, Rust development, and Unix infrastructure by Till Wegmüller (@toasterson)
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NSCopyObject, the griefer that keeps on griefing
NSCopyObject is a very old Foundation function – pre-dating Mac OS X entirely; from the NeXT era – that was originally basically just memcpy , but now it’s complicated. A lot more complicated.
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Building the new hypermedia systems
A shiny new edition of Hypermedia Systems is out! Apart from incorporating typo and grammar fixes sent in by readers, the book was completely redesigned inside with a new layout. To achieve a much higher fidelity of design, we ported the book to Typst --- the hot new LaTeX replacement.
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The power of two random choices
In many large-scale web services, multiple layers of stateless and stateful services are seperated by load balancers. Load balancing can be done with dedicated hardware, with dedicated software load balancers, using DNS trickery or through a load-balancing mechanism in the client. In large systems, the resources and…
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A brief history of Dell Unix (2008)
[update December 2021: files for 86Box install at update December 2020: Dell Unix on 86Box “Today let me present Dell Unix more properly, with 1024×768, 256 colors video and proper networking…
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SIMD < SIMT < SMT: Parallelism in Nvidia GPUs (2011)
Programmable NVIDIA GPUs are very inspiring to hardware geeks, proving that processors with an original, incompatible programming model can become widely used.
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Async2 – The .NET Runtime Async experiment concludes
The .NET team has been working on a new experiment called async2, which is a new implementation of the async/await pattern that is designed to be more efficient and more flexible than the current implementation. It started with green threads and ended with an experiment that moves async and await to the runtime. This…
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TCP connection timeout mystery
For over a year, I’ve been investigating a strange issue with the internet in my apartment. I’m posting the details here in case someone more knowledgeable than me can solve the mystery. I live in graduate student housing with internet provided by the university campus. Usually things work reasonably well, with one…
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Zed Editor: All Occurrences Search from 1s to 4ms
So zero-cost abstractions exist?
282
Finding out where syscalls are called from: Stack traces with strace
One of the great strengths of strace as a debugging tool is that it shows you what a program is doing regardless of whether it was compiled with debug info or not. The downside of this is that you …
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Message order in Matrix: right now, we are deliberately inconsistent
Coding in Rust and others; making coding videos.
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Mimalloc Cigarette: Losing one week of my life catching a memory leak (Rust)
How do you solve a memory heisenbug?
285
Let's consign CAP to the cabinet of curiosities
Brewer’s CAP theorem, and Gilbert and Lynch’s formalization of it , is the first introduction to hard trade-offs for many distributed systems engineers. Going by the vast amounts of ink and bile spent on the topic, it is not unreasonable for new folks to conclude that it’s an important, foundational, idea.
286
A Sketch of the Biggest Idea in Software Architecture (2022)
Narrow waists: an idea in software architecture that relates to networking, operating systems, language design, compilers, and distributed systems.
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Thinking in Actors – Challenging your software modelling to be simpler
Challenging your software modelling techniques to be simpler
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Arena-based parsers
The code is a bit "experimental" but it's available in the arena-fixes branch (make sure to enable --features=development if you run it from a Git repo).
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M3 CPU cores have become more versatile
M3 chips widen the gap between Pro and Max variants. They also change relative performance between P and E cores to make M3 CPUs more versatile.
291
Compiling to Assembly from Scratch
Then come along! Let’s make a compiler that goes all the way from source to assembly from scratch—no shortcuts!
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Why is Snapshot Isolation not enough?
Let's talk about why Snapshot Isolation is not enough for a general purpose concurrency control. Snapshot Isolation has been adap...
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Building a baseline JIT for Lua automatically (2023)
This is the Part 2 of a series. Feel free to read the prequel for more context: Building the fastest Lua interpreter automatically Building a good VM for a dynamic language takes a ton of engineerin
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OpenBSD, the computer appliance maker's secret weapon
Between our ESP32 prokaryotic organisms and our 24/7 Internet-enabled megafauna servers, there exists a vast and loosely-defined ecosystem of things the B2B world likes to call computer appliances. Picture a bespoke Pi 4 packaged up neatly with some Python scripts, a little fancy plastic embossing, and maybe a…
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The memory remains: Permanent memory with systemd and a Rust allocator
A Rust object that survives program restart thanks to Rust allocators, systemd's file descriptor store, and syscall memfd_create.
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Summing ASCII encoded integers on Haswell at almost the speed of memcpy
“Print the sum of 50 million ASCII-encoded integers uniformly sampled from [0, 2³¹−1], separated by a single new line and sent to standard input.”
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Way too many ways to wait on a child process with a timeout
I often need to launch a program in the terminal in a retry loop. Maybe because it's flaky, or because it tries to contact a remote service that is not available. A few scenarios: