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Borrow Checking, RC, GC, and the Eleven () Other Memory Safety Approaches
Zeke: "Wait, so with generational references, we now have four ways to do memory safety?"
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Why not just do simple C++ RAII in C?
Ever since I finished publishing the “defer” paper and successfully defended it on its first go-around (it now has tentative approval to go to a Technical Specification, I just need to obtain the necessary written boilerplate to do so), an old criticism
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Ruby methods are colorless
👋🏼 This is part of series on concurrency, parallelism and asynchronous programming in Ruby. It’s a deep dive, so it’s divided into 12 main parts: Your Ruby programs are always multi-threaded: Part 1 Your Ruby programs are always multi-threaded: Part 2 Consistent, request-local state Ruby methods are colorless The…
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PyPy has been working for me for several years now
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Small Strings in Rust: smolstr vs. smartstring (2020)
Hey everyone! This article is brought to you by a shameless nerd snipe, courtesy of Pascal. In case you’ve blocked Twitter for your own good, this reads: There should be a post explaining and compa...
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Unification in Elixir
Pattern matching is a pervasive and powerful tool in Elixir. This isn't too surprising if you know a little about the history of Elixir's parent language, Erlang. Erlang was originally inspired by and written in Prolog, a logic programming language where pattern matching has first-class support. In
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Rustgo: Calling Rust from Go with near-zero overhead (2017)
Go has good support for calling into assembly, and a lot of the fast cryptographic code in the stdlib is carefully optimized assembly, bringing speedups of over 20 times.
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The bane of my existence: Supporting both async and sync code in Rust
Sit beside me and hear this crazy old man's tale of when I asked Rust for too much
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Identifying Rust's collect:<Vec<_>>() memory leak footgun
Over the weekend, I was working on a personal Rust project when I ran into an excessive memory usage problem. After an evening of trial and error, I found a workaround to fix the memory usage, but I still didn’t understand how the issue was even possible, so I then spent another evening digging through the source code…
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A History of C Compilers – Part 1: Performance, Portability and Freedom
Let's talk compilers with part one of a whistle stop tour of their history
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Stop making me memorize the borrow checker
I started learning Rust about 3 or 4 years ago. I am now knee-deep in several very complex Rust projects that keep slamming into the limitations of the Rust compiler. One of the most common and obnoxious problems is hitting a situation the borrow-checker can’t deal with and realizing that I need to completely…
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V Language Review (2023)
Review about V programming language in 2023
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I'm Betting on Call-by-Push-Value
Why call-by-push-value is the best evaluation strategy, and why it's going to take over
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500 Python Interpreters
As we approach the final release date for Python 3.13, I’ve seen an uptick in discussion regarding 3.13’s introduction of an optional GIL. While removing the GIL has been a long time coming for the average user (I’ve dreamt of this for nearly 20 years), there have actually been two concurrent efforts to improve…
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My mental model of setf was wrong
Lisp lets programs define new setf forms for assignment. The most common example is from CLOS , where a class like this:
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How we centralized and structured error handling in Golang
Handling errors in Go is simple and flexible – yet no structure! It’s supposed to be simple, right? Just return an error , wrapped with a message, and move on. Well, that simplicity quickly turns into chaotic as our codebase grows with more packages, more developers, and more “quick fixes” that stay there forever…
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Bril: An Intermediate Language for Teaching Compilers
I created a new intermediate language, called Bril, for teaching my funky open-source, hands-on compilers course. Because it’s for education, Bril prioritizes simplicity and regularity over more typical compiler priorities like performance and concision. This is an overview of Bril’s design, its quirks, and the…
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C++ left arrow operator (2016)
Sometimes you have a pointer to a class, and you want to invoke a method. You can use the -> operator for that.
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Optimizing Guile Scheme
Guile is a rather niche language that I love dearly. Guile is a Scheme dialect that features an advanced optimizing bytecode compiler, a JIT compiler, and a modest set of developer tools for inspecting and debugging. Through my time spent developing Chickadee , a game programming library, I have gotten quite familiar…
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Curl removes experimental HTTP back end in Rust
The ride is coming to an end. The experiment is done. We tried, but we admit defeat. Four years ago we started adding support for an alternative HTTP backend in curl. It would use a library written in rust, called hyper. The idea was to introduce an alternative implementation of HTTP internals that you could ……
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Notes on the Crystal Language
You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites . This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.
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Own Constant Folder in C/C++
I was talking with someone today that really really wanted the sqrtps to be used in some code they were writing. And because of a quirk with clang (still there as of clang 18.1.0), if you happened to use -ffast-math clang would butcher the use of the intrinsic. So for the code: __m128 test(const __m128 vec) { return…
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Swift Tooling: Windows Edition
Productivity on every platform - a deep dive on the ways we're writing Swift code on Windows, and improving the developer experience along the way.
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In-Depth Ruby Concurrency: Navigating the Ruby Concurrency Landscape
I was honored to present a talk on Ruby concurrency at RubyConf 2024. It represents a high-level distillation of much of my writing and research over the past year. The conference itself was great, and presenting was such a fun experience. Here is the talk, titled “In-Depth Ruby Concurrency: Navigating the Ruby…
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Hello world in C inline assembly (2018)
A C program that writes "hello, world!" to the console using inline assembly instead of standard library functions, demonstrating direct system call invocation.
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Async Rust in Three Parts
Async/await, or "async IO", is a new-ish Rust added async/await in 2019. For comparison, C# added it in 2012, Python in 2015, JS in 2017, and C++ in 2020. language feature that lets our programs do more than one thing at a time. It's sort of an alternative to multithreading, though Rust programs often use both…
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Rust's Ugly Syntax (2023)
People complain about Rust syntax. I think that most of the time when people think they have an issue with Rust's syntax, they actually object to Rust's semantics. In this slightly whimsical post, I'll try to disentangle the two.
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Fun with Go Iterators
Go 1.23 added Iterators, so lets build a js like streaming api
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Adding syntax to the CPython interpreter
Now lets's change the grammar so that if we don't have an else condition we default to None .