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Safe zero-copy operations in C#
My attempt at talking about one of the most underrated features of C#.
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 380 posts.
152
A fast, growable array with stable pointers in C
My last article about generic data structures in C was written to set the stage for today’s topic: A data structure with constant time indexing, stable pointers, and works well with arena allocators. Its been independently discovered by multiple programmers over the years and so goes by different names. A 2001 paper…
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Static Allocation with Zig
Introducing kv, a statically allocated key/value server.
154
Full Unicode Search at 50× ICU Speed with AVX‑512
ICU gets Unicode right and pays for it. This post shows a different approach: fold-safe windows, SIMD probes, and verifiers for fast UTF‑8 search.
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Huge Binaries
A problem I experienced when pursuing my PhD and submitting academic articles was that I had built solutions to problems that required dramatic scale to be effective and worthwhile. Responses to my publication submissions often claimed such problems did not exist; however, I had observed them during my time within…
156
Processing Strings 109x Faster Than Nvidia on H100
StringZilla v4 brings CUDA acceleration for string processing: 109x faster than Nvidia's CuDF on edit distances, plus 52-bit MinHash fingerprinting and AES-based hashing.
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Machine Code Isn't Scary
Machine code isn't scary. If you can make sure your JSON conforms to a JSON schema, you can write machine code.
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Linux Capabilities Revisited
Technical blog by Stephan Berger (@malmoeb)
159
Taking a Look at Compression Algorithms
Dissecting various compression algorithms.
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Bypassing disk encryption on systems with automatic TPM2 unlock
oddlama's personal web page and blog
161
Formal Methods: Just Good Engineering Practice? (2024)
Earlier this week, I did the keynote at TLA+ conf 2024 ( watch the video or check out the slides ). My message in the keynote was something I have believed to be true for a long time: formal methods are an important part of good software engineering practice. If you’re a software engineer, especially one working on…
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The G in GPU is for Graphics damnit
As is true for everything, a lot of things need to happen for anything to happen, and so it’s true for this blogpost as well. Out of all of these everything that needed to happen, 3 are these:
164
Why did containers happen?
Autumn update This is what it is looking like around here at the moment. DevOpsDays London I gave a talk at DevOpsDays London recently. It was a nice...
165
Linux on the Fujitsu Lifebook U729
A short review and troubleshooting guide.
166
Bought myself an Ampere Altra system
There are tools and there are toys. I bought myself a tool.
167
Speeding up Unreal Editor launch by not spawning unused tooltips
If there is one thing the Unreal Engine doesn’t suffer from, it is it’s lack of features. Over the past years it has been transformed from “just” a game engine into an ̵…
168
ZFS: Apple's new filesystem that wasn't (2016)
Prologue (2006) I attended my first WWDC in 2006 to participate in Apple’s launch of their DTrace port to the next version of Mac OS X (Leopard). Apple…
169
Async I/O on Linux in databases
I've been working on a complex multi-model database for a few weeks now, and recently I took time to simplify and test out an idea I had on a simple key-value database. I started with the basics: A hash table in memory, a simple append-only log
170
No-Panic Rust: A Nice Technique for Systems Programming
Can Rust replace C? This is a question that has been on my mind for many years,as I created and now am tech lead forupb, a C libraryfor Protocol Buffers. Th...
171
Who has the fastest F1 website (2021)
Deep-diving on the load performance of F1 websites.
172
Why was Apache Kafka created?
The story behind how LinkedIn created Apache Kafka
173
In S3 simplicity is table stakes
From simple object storage to sophisticated table management, builders have always shaped S3's evolution. Andy Warfield discusses why making complex systems simple remains our north star at AWS.
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Tokio and Prctl = Nasty Bug
Recently I encountered a bug so cute that I immediately knew that I will want to share it on my blog. It was one of those bugs that even Rust can’t save you from. It occurred in HyperQueue (HQ), a distributed task scheduler written in Rust that I work on.
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Writing memory efficient C structs
A struct in C is the best way to organize your data so that you can easily use the data later in your program. However, there are a few caveats to C structures, mainly how their memory works. Note that I’m making a lot of assumptions about type sizes and standards. These can differ between systems and ABI’s, so for…
177
Making a micro Linux distro (2023)
A guide on building a simple Linux distribution from scratch. Detailed guide on building the kernel and the init process. Finally, a little distribution is built with u-root that is capable of connecting to the Internet.
178
Faster substring search with SIMD in Zig
I've been learning a lot about low level programming languages lately, and for a long time there has been one thing that has interested me: SIMD (or 'single ins…
179
RIP Usenix ATC
USENIX made the decision this week to discontinue its flagship Annual Technical Conference . When USENIX was started in 1975 — before the Internet, really — conferences were the fastest vector for practitioners to formally share their ideas, and USENIX ATC flourished. Speaking for myself, I came up lionizing ATC: I…
180
Optimizing a 6502 image decoder, from 70 minutes to 1 minute
A little walkthrough on an image decoder algorithm's high-level optimization, in order to make more digestable for a 6502 processor.