Richard Hart, principal engineer at Antithesis, shares hard-won lessons from leading a database development project over the past year. The presentation covers three main categories: performance optimization, reliability and scalability, and software engineering…

Today I have created a repository containing Jan van Katwijk’s Ada- Compiler (pronounced as Ada Minus). In the context of our Ada 83 Memory wiki we came across Jan’s PHD thesis from 1987. And it describes a compiler for a large subset of Ada. The main exclusion…

Eight ways to implement defer in C.

Large language models sometimes produce structured, first-person descriptions that explicitly reference awareness or subjective experience. To better understand this behavior, we investigate one...

Approximately 212 RFCs so far, starting with RFC 269, contain the terms `foo', `bar', or `foobar' as metasyntactic variables without any proper explanation or definition. This document rectifies that deficiency. This memo provides information for the Internet…

wingolog: article: six thoughts on generating c

One of the biggest problems in kernel development is dealing with concurrency. In a system whe [...]

Exploring allocator design in C, C3, Hare, Odin, Rust, and Zig.

This post is a case study of writing a Rust application using only minimal, artificially constrained API (eg, no dynamic memory allocation). It assumes a fair bit of familiarity with the language.

Interpreters have a bad reputation for having lower performance than just-in-time compilers. We present a new way of building high performance interpreters that is particularly effective for...

This paper presents important performance improvements for interpreters, exemplified by speedups of up to 5.5$\times$ for CPython. Although the original version of this papers was rejected...

Fast compilation is important when compilation occurs at runtime, such as query compilers in modern database systems and WebAssembly virtual machines in modern browsers. We present copy-and-patch,...