Best of 2018

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2018. 466 posts.

Software Engineering
376

Giving Mono Souper Powers

By virtue of using LLVM, Mono has access to a wide suite of tools and optimization backends. A lot of active research uses LLVM IR. One such research project, Souper, tries to brute-force a search for missed optimizations in our emitted code. The .NET community may have software projects that benefit from using Souper…

384

Fuzzing Like It’s 1989

With 2019 a day away, let’s reflect on the past to see how we can improve. Yes, let’s take a long look back 30 years and reflect on the original fuzzing paper, An Empirical Study of the Reliability of UNIX Utilities, and its 1995 follow-up, Fuzz Revisited, by Barton P. Miller. In this blog post, […]

388

GRPC and JSON

So you’ve bought into this whole RPC thing and want to try it out, but aren’t quite sure about Protocol Buffers. Your existing code encodes your own objects, or perhaps you have code that needs a particular encoding. What to do? Fortunately, gRPC is encoding agnostic! You can still get a lot of the benefits of gRPC…