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Go runtime: 4 years later
A check-in on the status of Go runtime development
Topics /
Systems & Performance
The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 6,942 posts.
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Let's compile like it's 1992 (2014)
I have been tinkering with the vanilla source code of Wolfenstein 3D from 1992. Even though it is more than 20 years old and has rotten for modern systems, you can still compile it if you recreate the environment. All you need is :
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Why DeepSeek is cheap at scale but expensive to run locally
Why is DeepSeek-V3 supposedly fast and cheap to serve at scale, but too slow and expensive to run locally? Why are some AI models slow to respond but fast once…
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How does Linux NAT a ping?
A few months ago, I found myself wondering how a command like ping 1.1.1.1 works from within a private network. In most private networks, multiple hosts connect to the Internet through a router. For IPv4, the router performs network address translation (NAT) by rewriting the original host’s source address to the…
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The Paxos Algorithm, or How to Win a Turing Award
The lectures assume no prior knowledge of the Paxos consensus algorithm or of TLA+, the language in which the specifications are written. In fact, the lectures constitute a crash course on TLA+. If you're interested just in the algorithm, you will probably find the specs annoying and will try to read only the…
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Stack Overflow: The Architecture – 2016 Edition
This is #1 in a very long series of posts on Stack Overflow’s architecture. Welcome.Previous post (#0): Stack Overflow: A Technical DeconstructionNext post...
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Infectious Executable Stacks
In software development there are many concepts that at first glance seem useful and sound, but, after considering the consequences of their implementation and use, are actually horrifying. Examples include thread cancellation , variable length arrays , and memory aliasing . GCC’s closure extension to C is another…
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C stdlib isn't threadsafe and even safe Rust didn't save us
Threads, TLS, a C stdlib race, and Rust: how EdgeDB hit a hidden landmine.
1090
Can I start using Wayland in 2026?
Wayland is the successor to the X server (X11, Xorg) to implement the graphics stack on Linux. The Wayland project was actually started in 2008, a year before I created the i3 tiling window manager for X11 in 2009 — but for the last 18 years (!), Wayland was never usable on my computers. I don’t want to be stuck on…
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The Next 50 Years of Databases (2015)
Andy attempts to revive his blog by predicting what databases will look like in the year 2065.
1092
Building the DirectX shader compiler better than Microsoft?
This is a story about the messy state of Microsoft’s DirectX shader compiler, and trying to wrangle it into a nicer experience for game developers. In some respects, building the DXC compiler better than how Microsoft does.
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More details about mitigations for the CPU Speculative Execution issue
Posted by Matt Linton, Senior Security Engineer and Pat Parseghian, Technical Program Manager Yesterday, Google’s Project Zero team posted...
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The end of a myth: Distributed transactions can scale
This paper appeared in VLDB'17. The paper presents NAM-DB, a scalable distributed database system that uses RDMA (mostly 1-way RDMA) and a ...
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The relative performance of C and Rust
My blog post on falling in love with Rust got quite a bit of attention – with many being surprised by what had surprised me as well: the high performance of my naive Rust versus my (putatively less naive?) C. However, others viewed it as irresponsible to report these performance differences, believing that these…
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What does an idle CPU do? (2014)
In the last post I said the fundamental axiom of OS behavior is that at any given time, exactly one and only one task is active on a CPU. But if there’s absolutely nothing to do, then what? It turns
1100
Subtly Bad Things Linux May Be Doing To PostgreSQL
In addition to talking about PostgreSQL at LSF/MM and Collab , I also learned a few things about the Linux kernel that I had not known befor...
1101
ChromeOS will soon be developed on large portions of the Android stack
ChromeOS will soon be developed on large portions of the Android stack to bring Google AI, innovations, and features faster to users.Over the last 13 years, we’ve evolve…
1102
WASM will replace containers
WebAssembly is a true write-once-run-anywhere experience.
1103
Raspberry Pi 5 has no hardware video encoding and only HEVC decoding
Announcing Raspberry Pi 5, coming in late October: over 2x faster than Raspberry Pi 4, featuring silicon designed in-house at Raspberry Pi.
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There is no 'printf'
In C, 'main' returns an int. What happens when you don't explicitly return a value, though? C99 provides a return value of 0, but C89... well, that's undefined, my favorite kind of behavior.
1106
TCP Tracepoints have arrived in Linux
Linux TCP Tracepoints, and using them via bcc/eBPF.
1107
Why is a Rust executable large?
Update (2016-10-07): The official FAQ has an entry for this exact problem now. I'll leave this post as more curiously minded people.
1108
Complexity Has to Live Somewhere
We try to get rid of the complexity, control it, and seek simplicity. I think framing things that way is misguided. Complexity has to live somewhere. Embrace it
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Branch predictor: How many “if”s are too many?
Is it ok to have if clauses that will basically never be run? Surely, there must be some performance cost to that...
1110
Escaping VirtualBox 6.1: Part 1
This post is about a VirtualBox escape for the latest currently available version (VirtualBox 6.1.16 on Windows). The vulnerabilities were discovered and exploited by our team Sauercl0ud as part of the RealWorld CTF 2020/2021. The vulnerability was known to the organizers, requires the guest to be able to insert…