Best of 2023

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2023. 555 posts.

Systems & Performance
289

Huge pages are a good idea

Nearly all programs are written to access virtual memory addresses, which the CPU must translate to physical addresses. These translations are usually fast because the mappings are cached in the CPU's Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) . Unfortunately, virtual memory on x86 has used a 4 kiB page size since the 386 was…

292

PostgreSQL 14 Internals

I’m excited to announce that the translation of the “ PostgreSQL 14 Internals ” book is finally complete thanks to the amazing work of Liudmila Mantrova. The final part of the book considers each of the index types in great detail. It explains and demonstrates how access methods, operator classes, and data types work…

296

Philosophy of Coroutines

I encountered the idea as a student, when I first read The Art of Computer Programming . I’d been programming already for most of my childhood, and I was completely blown away by the idea, which was entirely new to me. In fact, it’s probably not an exaggeration to say that in the whole of TAOCP that was the single…

298

Windows NT 3.1 on Dec Alpha AXP

As I was preparing the Windows NT RISC exhibit for VCF west , I realized that I’m missing a rather important piece of the history. While I was showing the potentially last DEC Alpha Windows build ever – AXP64 2210 , I don’t have anything earlier than NT 3.51. It would be nice to showcase the very first RTM version …

300

Not knowing the /proc file system

Overview Edit: this post was discussed on hacker news Some of the comments contained valuable reviews of the C code listed below. I’ve appended some edits after the original listing. I’ve been working quite with files and file systems on Linux recently. Mostly from the vantage point of either a shell or a python…