What's your favourite file checksum when you don't need cryptographic strength?
md5sum is convenient (it's installed on most systems), but it was originally intended to be secure. I just want a fast content check.
(Or is sha256sum sufficiently optimised that it doesn't matter?)
miniblog.
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The efficiency of wasm is really impressive. An optimised build of Stockfish with POPCNT evaluates positions at ~1500kn/s on a single core of machine. By contrast, the wasm build on https://lichess.org/analysis/r4rk1/p5b1/2p2n2/1p2p3/4P2q/P1N1B3/1PP1B1Q1/2KR3n_w#0 can compute ~42kn/s in the browser for the same position!
Fabulous article on benchmarking JIT optimised VMs: performance can vary massively, warmups can be unpredictable, optimisation sometimes hurts perf and you may not even reach a steady state!
Excellent article discussing the bytecode used to fit text adventure games on early PCs with tiny RAM: https://mud.co.uk/richard/htflpism.htm
ZIL was lisp-inspired, heavily optimised string storage (5.5 bytes per character!) and had some fun opcodes that were very specific to text games.