Best of 2022

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2022. 1,551 posts.

Software Engineering
1421

Implementing ‘strlen’ using SVE

In C, the length of a string in marked by a 0 byte at the end of the string. Thus to determine the length of the string, one must scan it, looking for the 0 byte. Recent ARM processors have a powerful instruction set (SVE) that is well suited for such problems. It allows you … Continue reading Implementing ‘strlen’…

1429

A Faster Lexer in Go

It's been a while since I've last rewritten my favorite lexical analyzer :-) That post is the last in a series implementing a lexer for the TableGen language in a variety of programming languages, using multiple techniques. The last lexer written, in Go, was very fast indeed - processing 1 MiB of source in about 20…

1440

89 Operating Systems

I occasionally do talks about curl. In these talks I often include a few slides that say something abut curl's coverage and presence on different platforms. Mostly to boast of course, but also to help explain to the audience how curl has manged to reach its ten billion installations. This is current incarnation of…