This week
- Go's concurrency is one of the main reasons people like the language. You write go f(), send values through channels, and the runtime scheduler runs thousands of goroutines on just a few OS threads. It feels effortless.None of that machinery exists in C. Which made me wonder:...
- As a software engineer, how well do you have to understand your own codebase? My guess is that people who work on small codebases with low-turnover teams (say, Redis or games like The Witness) would say “obviously you have to understand it completely, otherwise you can’t do good...
Last week
- Before we begin, I want to say I don't care that much if you disagree with me. There's no sound precise mathematical definition of Object Oriented, no ISO standard, and no grand arbiter who decides what is and what is not OO (although I believe Casey Muratori may have applied...
Two weeks ago
- I submitted talk proposals about Pystd, the from-scratch written standard library for C++ (custom design, not a implementation of the ISO specification) to a bunch of conferences. Unfortunately all of them were rejected, so it's blog posting time. A controversial opinion Pretty...
- A lot of fast code starts as a boring loop.Modern hardware can perform the same operation on multiple values at once (e.g. SIMD and SIMT), and sometimes we write code directly for those execution models but other times, a compiler starts with regular-looking code and rewrites it...
About a month ago
- In the previous post, we introduced algebraic topology through one of its most important objects: chain complexes. We saw how chain complexes can be constructed from cellulations of manifolds and how they give rise to CSS codes. But the main reason both mathematicians and...
about 1 month ago
- One of the many nice language features in Python are keyword arguments. They make some types of APIs concise and readable. Like so: Unfortunately C does not have keyword arguments and, by extension, neither does C++. Adding them as a language feature would take 15-20 years of...
- Technical debt lives in your code. Cognitive debt lives in your head. Intent debt lives in the artifacts you never wrote - the goals, constraints and rationale that explain why the system is the way it is. It's the one kind of debt your agents can't pay down for you, and the one...
- The masterwork of Terry A. Davis is his eclectic operating system, TempleOS, which he worked on until his tragic death in 2018. In terms of technical excellence, TempleOS rates well in some respects and poorly in others. For example, it earns the achievement, coveted in OS dev...
- The very first computer programming class I ever took introduced me to the idea of there being different kinds of numbers, like integers, floats, and doubles (it was a C++ course). “You mean, when I assign a variable, I have to say up front what kind of number this is?” It was...
about 2 months ago
- Birgitta Böckeler finishes her post on sensors for coding agents by examining the role of a test suite as a regression sensor, focusing on the role mutation testing can play. more…...
- Agentic software development hypothesis This is the quality content you come here for, right? Agentic Software Development Hypothesis: Weak form: Any coding task for which a complete specification is available will become trivial. Strong form: Any coding task for which a...
- Birgitta Böckeler adds discussion of three more sensors for static code analysis, focusing on checking and enforcing better modularity. Computational sensors for dependency checks were good at enforcing rules, but the rules were limited. Building a computational sensor for...
- In her recent article about harness engineering for coding agent users, Birgitta Böckeler laid out a mental model for expanding a coding agent harness: a system of guides and sensors that increase the probability of good agent outputs and enable self-correction before issues...
2 months ago
- No comment on this PR may mention the following topics: Long-term social or economic impact of LLMs The environmental impact of LLMs Anything to do with the copyright status of LLM output Moral judgements about people who use LLMs We have asked the moderation team to help us...
- Increasingly humans delegate writing code to agents. Will there even be source code in the future? To wrestle with this question, we have to understand what code is. Unmesh Joshi sees code as having two distinct but intertwined purposes: instructions to a machine and a...
- In the early 1960s, Fred Brooks managed the development of IBM's System/360 computer systems. After it was done he penned his thoughts in the book The Mythical Man-Month which became one of the most influential books on software development after its publication in 1975. Reading...
- To continue our journey into quantum error correction, it is time to dive deeper into the theoretical foundations of the field. When learning about the surface code, you might have wondered: what exactly makes it work? Would it work as well on lattices other than the square...
3 months ago
- In our previous episode we wrote a merge sort implementation that runs a bit faster than the one in stdlibc++. The question then becomes, could it be made even faster. If you go through the relevant literature one potential improvement is to do a multiway merge. That is, instead...
- As of this PR, simdutf can be used without libc++ or libc++abi1. Simdutf was the final remaining libc++ dependency in libghostty-vt2. After updating Ghostty to use this new simdutf build, we were able to remove libc++ and libc++abi completely from our dependencies. Note that at...
- In an earlier blog post we found out that Pystd's simple sorting algorithm implementations were 5-10% slower than their stdlibc++ counterparts. The obvious follow up nerd snipe is to ask "can we make the Pystd implementation faster than stdlibc++?" For all tests below the data...
- To pursue our quantum error correction journey, we now need to dive deeper into the maths that underlie the main ideas of the field! Why \(k\) in the surface code is independent on the specific cellulation. We will see chain complexes, homological algebra, etc. All codes are...
- Creating a subset of Go that translates to C was never my end goal. I liked writing C code with Go, but without the standard library it felt pretty limited. So, the next logical step was to port Go's stdlib to C.Of course, this isn't something I could do all at once. I started...
4 months ago
- One of the most optimized algorithms in any standard library is sorting. It is used everywhere so it must be fast. Thousands upon thousands of developer hours have been sunk into inventing new algorithms and making sort implementations faster. Pystd has a different design...
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