miniblog.

Feb 23, 2019
Plans for low-level font rendering API in Rust and ultimately Firefox: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1aw41q_izail-p99mN8dHrJeh9tMQ-Pldi54W6m7MHU8/edit Rendering fonts is one of those hugely complex issues that computer solve and I'm very ignorant about. We are lucky to not start with blank machines.
Project roadmap: low level text layout
Project roadmap: low level text layout
Project roadmap: low level text layout Raph Levien 19 Feb 2019 I am starting a new project to create an open source Rust library for low level text layout. By “low-level” I mean that many of the higher level concerns, including line breaking, hyphenation, and representation of rich text, would b...
Feb 23, 2019
Today I learnt that clippy doesn't run on your tests by default! `cargo clippy --all-targets` will make lots of additional useful suggestions on your Rust code.
Feb 22, 2019
Trying to update bfc for recent LLVM, and reviewing the Rust docs to see what I need to update. Not sure if I should be complimented or concerned that bfc is suggested as an API example! https://crates.io/crates/llvm-sys
Feb 22, 2019
New features in Java 12, including a new switch statement!
What’s new in Java 12
Let’s take a look what is inside Java 12. The new Java release contains less major enhancements than the previous version: 8 JEPs in Java 12 vs 17 JEPs in Java 11. As you of course remember, JEP stands for JDK Enhancement Proposal. Java 11 also had more closed entries in Jira: ~2700 in Java 11 vs ~2400 in Java 12. But it’s only mid of Feb 2019, maybe they can deliver 300 Jira entries by Mar 19th 2019 when Java 12 is planned to be released. Now let’s take a closed look what is in Java 12.
Feb 22, 2019
Impressive bug investigation story using Jepsen to test Cockroach DB:
Lessons learned from 2+ years of nightly Jepsen tests
Lessons learned from 2+ years of nightly Jepsen tests
After two years of nightly testing, we’ve come to learn the power and limitations of Jepsen as a testing tool.
Feb 22, 2019
Training a neural net on Linux kernel patches to decide which ones should be cherry-picked to stable: https://lwn.net/Articles/764647/ (Features used: 10,000 most common words, code metrics, author IDs.)
Machine learning and stable kernels
There are ways to get fixes into the stable kernel trees, but they require humans to identify [...]
Feb 22, 2019
Google research concludes that there's no viable fix for Spectre in vulnerable hardware:
Google Says Spectre And Meltdown Are Too Difficult To Fix
Programming book reviews, programming tutorials,programming news, C#, Ruby, Python,C, C++, PHP, Visual Basic, Computer book reviews, computer history, programming history, joomla, theory, spreadsheets and more.
Feb 20, 2019
An incredible paper showing a technique for compaction in C/C++ when the program can futz with raw memory addresses!
Mesh: Compacting Memory Management for C/C++ Applications
Mesh: Compacting Memory Management for C/C++ Applications
Programs written in C/C++ can suffer from serious memory fragmentation, leading to low utilization of memory, degraded performance, and application failure due to memory exhaustion. This paper introduces Mesh, a plug-in replacement for malloc that, for the first time, eliminates fragmentation in unmodified C/C++ applications. Mesh combines novel randomized algorithms with widely-supported virtual memory operations to provably reduce fragmentation, breaking the classical Robson bounds with high probability. Mesh generally matches the runtime performance of state-of-the-art memory allocators while reducing memory consumption; in particular, it reduces the memory of consumption of Firefox by 16% and Redis by 39%.
Feb 18, 2019
I've written a lot of lisp, including a respectable number of macros, and I don't think I've ever been caught out by hygiene. I've definitely written broken macros that expanded to the wrong thing though.
Feb 18, 2019
AVX-512 instructions consume a ton of power, producing heat, and leading CPUs to significantly reduce their clock speed!
On the dangers of Intel
While I was writing the post comparing the new Qualcomm server chip, Centriq, to our current stock of Intel Skylake-based Xeons, I noticed a disturbing phenomena.
Feb 18, 2019
Ten years of Dvorak, touch typing, and what to use on smartphones: https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/17/18223384/dvorak-qwerty-keyboard-layout-10-years-speed-ergonomics
Feb 17, 2019
A fun computer concept video from Sun in 1993: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKJNxgZyVo0 It's interesting to see their screen form factor: both vertical and horizontal! They also expect a ton of voice command interaction.
Feb 17, 2019
When mentoring junior developers, it's important to be available to unblock them. It's equally important to show them how *you* found the answer, so they become empowered
Feb 16, 2019
Two dot diffs, three dot diffs, and the novel diff approach used in Bitbucket Server: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/BSERV-7375?focusedCommentId=1931374&page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels%3Acomment-tabpanel#comment-1931374
Feb 15, 2019
I've seen posts about people rewriting projects from language A to B, but it's rare to see B back to A afterwards! https://dannyvankooten.com/from-go-back-to-php-again/ (Interesting to see the PHP debug tooling too.)
Moving from Go to PHP again
Moving from Go to PHP again
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