A review of the Julia language
Here’s a language that gives near-C performance that feels like Python or Ruby with optional type annotations (that you can feed to one of two static...
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Integer overflow checking cost
How much overhead should we expect from enabling integer overflow checks? Using a compiler flag or built-in intrinsics, we should be able to do the check...
Read moreMalloc tutorial
Let’s write a malloc and see how it works with existing programs! This is basically an expanded explanation of what I did after reading this tutorial...
Read moreMarkets, discrimination, and “lowering the bar”
Public discussions of discrimination in tech often result in someone claiming that discrimination is impossible because of market forces. Here’s a quote from Marc Andreessen that...
Read moreTF-IDF linux commits
I was curious what different people worked on in Linux, so I tried grabbing data from the current git repository to see if I could pull...
Read moreOne week of bugs
If I had to guess, I’d say I probably work around hundreds of bugs in an average week, and thousands in a bad week. It’s not...
Read moreSpeeding up this site by 50x
I’ve seen all these studies that show how a 100ms improvement in page load time has a significant effect on page views, conversion rate, etc., but...
Read moreHow often is the build broken?
I’ve noticed that builds are broken and tests fail a lot more often on open source projects than on “work” projects. I wasn’t sure how much...
Read moreLiterature review on the benefits of static types
There are some pretty strong statements about types floating around out there. The claims range from the oft-repeated phrase that when you get the types to...
Read moreCLWB and PCOMMIT
The latest version of the Intel manual has a couple of new instructions for non-volatile storage, like SSDs. What’s that about? Before we look at the...
Read moreCaches: LRU v. random
Once upon a time, my computer architecture professor mentioned that using a random eviction policy for caches really isn’t so bad. That random eviction isn’t bad...
Read moreTesting v. informal reasoning
This is an off-the-cuff comment for Hacker School’s Paper of the Week Read Along series for Out of the Tar Pit. I find the idea itself,...
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