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The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 399 posts.
I recently released papaya, a fast and feature-complete concurrent hash table for Rust. In this post I want to dive into the design and research that went into creating it, as well as why you might consider using it over existing solutions.
This document has been assembled to supplement a set of instructions about writing one's own bootloader for the RP2040. Writing a bootloader requires some understanding of the boot sequence, but it became a bit too cumbersome to include that explanation in the bootloader documentation.
Wait, but how does async even work? (Animated)
ISO/IEC 60601-1-8, Patterson and other alarms in medical equipment Sample Alarm Sounds - Sirens, buzzers and other sounds
Go has good support for calling into assembly, and a lot of the fast cryptographic code in the stdlib is carefully optimized assembly, bringing speedups of over 20 times.
In 1979, Intel introduced the 8088 microprocessor, a variant of the 16-bit 8086 processor. IBM's decision to use the 8088 processor in the I...
Best practices for handling context plumbing in Go
One of Go's advantages is being able to produce statically-linked binaries [1] . This doesn't mean that Go always produces such binaries by default, however; in some scenarios it requires extra work to make this happen. Specifics here are OS-dependent; here we focus on Unix systems.
Using linked lists to optimize performance in a JSON schema validator.
At the beginning of the year, I wrote a bunch of articles on the various tricks DOS played to overcome the tight memory limits of x86’s real mode. There was one question that came up and remained unanswered: what were the various “models” that the compilers of the day offered?
Lately I’ve been thinking about Stephan Berger’s recent blog post on hiding Linux processes with bind mounts. Bottom line here is that if you have an evil process you want to hide, use …
I recently worked on two different C projects, and I wanted to structure them in a way that would make them easy to maintain and understand. I also wanted to make sure that the projects were easy to build and test. In this post, I will share my experience and the best practices I found for structuring C projects.
My day job is in browsers and cryptography , not compilers, yet I often find that I need to spend more of my time working through the semantics of programming languages than using them. This post discusses a thorny cross-language issue between C, C++, and Rust. In short:
This colorful series walks you through the networking basics in just a few thousand words! It also offers hands-on labs to practice the obtained knowledge.
How does the Linux kernel represent processes and their state: A breakdown of task_struct and mm_struct
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…
A bug, most probably in the early part of kernel boot in guest macOS, prevents M4 Macs virtualising macOS prior to 13.4.
Around a decade ago, I was happy to learn about bcache – a Linux block cache system that implements tiered storage (like a pool of hard disks with SSDs for cache) on Linux. At that stage, ZFS on Linux was nowhere close to where it is today, so any progress on gaining more ZFS features in general Linux systems was very…
As projects get more complicated the tooling has to improve. Outgrowing the arduino-ide is easy on the Pi Pico with the excelent pico-sdk but what if things get even more complicated...
1500 bytes is a bit out there as numbers go, or at least it seems that way if you touch computers for a living. It’s not a power of two or anywhere close, it’s suspiciously base-ten-round, and computers don’t care all that much about base ten, so how did we get here?
I am responsible for the reliability of the firmware updates on our devices and this work never gets boring. The thing about firmware updates is that by definition, every bug is caused by the updater because before installing the affected version, the bug was not present. You could say that updates are the cause and…
UPDATE: This blog post has been updated based on feedback from Reddit and Hacker News. HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id...
Collectively, we have been thinking about sorting for longer than we have had computers. There is still an active literature 1 , 2 , 3 . We are taught that how the counts of comparisons and swaps vary with problem size is what matters: as problems get bigger, order dominates, and anything else is buried in the noise…
There are significant changes happening in distributed systems.
Building Surfgrad, a high-performant, WebGPU-powered autograd library
