Best of 2017

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2017. 498 posts.

Systems & Performance
53

Rust Performance Pitfalls

Overall, Rust is pretty good for performance. Write the most simple, naive stuff, and it will usually run within a factor of two from optimized C/C++ code, without any further performance work on the code. With some investment into optimizations, matching or exceeding C’s speed should be possible in most cases…

58

Terminal and shell performance

There’s a great MSR demo from 2012 that shows the effect of latency on the experience of using a tablet . If you don’t want to watch the three minute video, they basically created a device which could simulate arbitrary latencies down to a fraction of a millisecond. At 100ms (1/10th of a second), which is typical of…

59

Fewer mallocs in curl

Today I landed yet another small change to libcurl internals that further reduces the number of small mallocs we do. This time the generic linked list functions got converted to become malloc-less (the way linked list functions should behave, really). Instrument mallocs I started out my quest a few weeks ago by…