Best of 2017

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

Systems & Performance
195

On mutex performance and WTF::Lock

One of the things I’ve been doing this quarter is removing Gecko’s dependence on NSPR locks . Gecko’s (non-recursive) mutexes and condition variables now use platform-specific constructs, rather than indirecting through NSPR. This change makes things smaller, especially on POSIX platforms, and uses no dynamic memory…

204

Compiler Optimizations are Awesome

Another reason for optimizing compilers: It allows us to write simple and obvious code expecting that the compiler will do the optimization. This both reduces the initial defect count and makes the code more maintainable in the long-run. Note that these are also often the simplest optimizations (e.g. a calculation…