Best of 2021

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2021. 1,517 posts.

Software Engineering
391

Io_uring is not an event system

I’ve been hearing about io_uring on and off for the last couple of years. Its a relatively new technology in Linux to allow high-performance IO with very few overheads. Whenever its been mentioned, its usually been presented as a new alternative to select, poll and epoll. This led me to believe that it was just the…

393

Firefox's Optimized Zip Format

This post is about minimizing amount of disk IO and CPU overhead when reading Zip files. I recently saw an article about a new format that was faster than zip. This is quite surprising as to my mind, zip is one of the most flexible and low-overhead formats I’ve encountered. Some googling showed me that over past 11…

406

Word-Aligned Bloom Filters

Programmers often need to 'filter out' data. Suppose that you are given a database of users where only a small percentage are 'paying customers' (say 5% or less). You can write an SQL query to check whether a given user is indeed a paying customer, but it might require a round trip to your database … Continue reading…

407

Racket v8.0

_posted by John Clements_ Racket version 8.0 is now available from https://racket-lang.org/. *** Racket 8.0 is here!*** Racket 8.0 marks the first release where Racket CS is the default implementation. Creating, polishing, and adopting Racket CS has be...

413

On navigating a large codebase

A while ago, I’ve been working on a very large codebase that consisted of a few million lines of code. Large systems are usually a big mess and this one was no exception. Since this is a rather common problem in software engineering, I thought the internet would be littered with stories about this topic. There is a…