Best of 2020

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2020. 190 posts.

Systems & Performance
61

Jepsen: Etcd 3.4.3

The etcd key-value store is a distributed system intended for use as a coordination primitive. Like Zookeeper and Consul , etcd stores a small volume of infrequently-updated state ( by default, up to 8 GB ) in a key-value map, and offers strict-serializable reads, writes and micro-transactions across the entire…

67

Swift Atomics

I’m delighted to announce Swift Atomics, a new open source package that enables direct use of low-level atomic operations in Swift code. The goal of this library is to enable intrepid systems programmers to start building synchronization constructs (such as concurrent data structures) directly in Swift.

69

Jepsen: Dgraph 1.1.1

Dgraph is a graph database which aims to provide scalable, highly-available, and snapshot-isolated transactions over a labeled directed graph, while minimizing network communication for performance. Conceptually, Dgraph stores a set of (entity, attribute, value) triples. Entities (also known as subjects), are compact…

75

Jepsen: Redis-Raft 1b3fbf6

Redis is a fast single-threaded data structure server, commonly used as a cache, scratchpad, queue, or coordination mechanism between distributed applications. It offers operations over a broad array of datatypes , including binary blobs, lists, sets, sorted sets, maps, geohashes, counters, channels, streams, and…

82

PostgreSQL B-Tree index deduplication

PostgreSQL 13 development is coming along nicely, Postgres 13 Beta3 was released on 8/13/2020 . The Postgres Beta 1 and 2 releases were released in May and June 2020. One of the features that has my interest in Postgres 13 is the B-Tree deduplication effort. B-Tree indexes are the default indexing method in Postgres…