Best of 2023

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2023. 391 posts.

Systems & Performance
277

You could have invented futexes

The futex ( f ast u serspace mu tex ) is a Linux kernel feature designed for synchronization primitives (mutexes, condition variables, semaphores, etc.). Like many topics in concurrency, they have a reputation for being tricky (for example, see the paper Futexes Are Tricky ). Despite that, they really are a…

290

Graceful behavior at capacity

Suppose we’ve got a service. We’ll gloss over the details for now, but let’s stipulate that it accepts requests from the outside world, and takes some action in response. Maybe those requests are HTTP requests, or RPCs, or just incoming packets to be routed at the network layer. We can get more specific later. What…

300

Service mesh use cases (2020)

Service mesh is a blazing hot topic in software engineering right now and rightfully so. I think it’s extremely promising technology and I’d love to see it widely adopted (in cases where it truly makes sense). Yet it remains shrouded in mystery for many people and even those who are familiar with it have trouble…