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Systems & Performance

The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 343 posts.

2020
332

Understanding Raft Consensus

Recently I was digging deeper into Raft , an important algorithm in the field of distributed systems. Raft is a consensus algorithm , meaning that it is designed to facilitate a set of computers agreeing on a state of the world (more on exactly how the state of the world is represented later), even when communications…

333

ARM MacBook vs. Intel MacBook

Up to yesterday, my laptop was a large 15-inch MacBook Pro. It contains an Intel Kaby Lake processor (3.8 GHz). I just got a brand-new 13-inch 2020 MacBook Pro with Apple's M1 ARM chip (3.2 GHz). How do they compare? I like precise data points. Recently, I have been busy benchmarking number parsing routines where you…

336

Containers from first principles

You’ve likely heard everyone at the office or online proclaim that “K8s has eaten everyone’s lunch!” or that “everything should be in a docker container!”. While there are advantages to the above methodologies; it’s very easy to have cargo-culted their adoption; especially for Kubernetes (K8s). I find the biggest…

342

Shrinking a Kotlin Binary by 99.2%

We'll get to the shrinking, but first let's motivate the binary in question. Three years ago I wrote the "Surfacing Hidden Change to Pull Requests" post which covered pushing important stats and diffs into PRs as a comment. This avoids surprises with changes that affect binary size, manifests, and dependency trees.

343

The Day The Standard Library Died

In Prague, the C++ committee took a series of polls on whether to break ABI, and decided not to. There was no applause. But I’m not sure we fully understood what we did and the consequences it could have.