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Systems & Performance

The most popular blog posts about systems & performance on Hacker News. 543 posts.

2025
92

Linux Sandboxes and Fil-C

Memory safety and sandboxing are two different things. It's reasonable to think of them as orthogonal: you could have memory safety but not be sandboxed, or you could be sandboxed but not memory safe.

93

Zlib-rs is faster than C

We've released version 0.4.2 of zlib-rs , featuring a number of substantial performance improvements. We are now (to our knowledge) the fastest api-compatible zlib implementation for decompression, and beat the competition in the most important compression cases too.

106

21 GB/s CSV Parsing Using SIMD on AMD 9950X

Sep 0.10.0 was released April 22nd, 2025 with optimizations for AVX-512 capable CPUs like the AMD 9950X (Zen 5) and updated benchmarks including the 9950X. Sep now achieves a staggering 21 GB/s on the 9950X for the low-level CSV parsing. 🚀 Before 0.10.0, Sep achieved ~18 GB/s on 9950X.

108

Beware of Fast-Math

One of my more frequent rants, both online and in person, is the danger posed by the "fast-math" compiler flag. While these rants may elicit resigned acknowledgment from those who already understand the dangers involved, they do little to help those who don't. So given the remarkable paucity of writing on the topic…

111

The Journey Before main()

A while back, I worked on a RISC-V-based userspace simulator for fun. In doing so, taught myself a lot more than I wanted to know about what happens in-between when the Kernel is asked to run a program, and when the first line of our program’s main function is actually executed. Here’s a summary of that rabbit hole.

120

Writing a simple pool allocator in C

I found out about pool allocators some time ago, and I really liked its simplicity and high performance, so I decided to write my own. This article was initially inspired by Dmitry Soshnikov’s article . It’s also worth mentioning that this article was discussed in Hacker News .