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Systems & Performance

The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 569 posts.

2024
301

The weirdest QNX bug I've encountered (2021)

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…

318

Optimizing Guile Scheme

Guile is a rather niche language that I love dearly. Guile is a Scheme dialect that features an advanced optimizing bytecode compiler, a JIT compiler, and a modest set of developer tools for inspecting and debugging. Through my time spent developing Chickadee , a game programming library, I have gotten quite familiar…

326

Mark–Scavenge: Waiting for Trash to Take Itself Out

This blog post summarises a new garbage collection algorithm called Mark-Scavenge, which highlights how using reachability as a proxy for liveness in moving GCs leads to unnecessary data movement and how we can address this. This work is from the latest paper within the research collaboration between Oracle and…

327

Understanding x86_64 Paging

I’ve spent quite a lot of time messing with x86_64 page tables, understanding address translation is not easy and when I started learning about it I felt like a lot of the material out there on how it works was hard for me to wrap my head around. So in this blog post I am going to attempt to provide a kind of “what I…