Best of 2019

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2019. 498 posts.

Systems & Performance
136

FaunaDB 2.5.4

In 2012, Thomson, Diamond, Weng, et al. published Calvin: Fast Distributed Transactions for Partitioned Database Systems : a transactional protocol optimized for geographic replication. Each Calvin cluster is comprised of multiple replicas , where a replica is a collection of nodes which store a complete copy of the…

139

A fork() in the road

The received wisdom suggests that Unix’s unusual combination of fork() and exec() for process creation was an inspired design. In this paper, we argue that fork was a clever hack for machines and programs of the 1970s that has long outlived its usefulness and is now a liability. We catalog the ways in which fork […]