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Deobfuscating Luraph: Lifting Lua to LLVM, Then Letting AI Try
Naci lifts Luraph-protected Lua to LLVM IR, explains why dynamic table operations survive optimization, and tests how far AI-assisted tooling and partial evaluation get at stripping the VM — and where AI just produces plausible-looking output.
17 min · 3,827 words
Compiler bootstrapping depends on more than you might think
Chris Siebenmann on bootstrapping the Go toolchain from C sources, and how OS and environment changes complicate the “start from source” story more than the language docs suggest.
3 min · 627 words
Brooks Lybrand asks whether web frameworks still matter in the age of vibe coding and agents—and whether there is still room to build new ones after React’s win.
19 min · 4,419 words
Nixpkgs for the frontend impaired
Farid Zakaria introduces jinx, a tool that compiles Nix to TypeScript so all of nixpkgs can be evaluated in the browser with exact drvPath parity—aimed at making Nix’s package graph inspectable without installing Nix.
6 min · 1,431 words
Did Ente Locker copy my code without attribution?
FairScan's developer Pierre-Yves Nicolas describes finding that Ente Locker's new document-scanning feature, which credited FairScan's segmentation model, appears to reuse several of FairScan's GPL image-processing implementations despite claiming they were written from scratch, and reflects on what that means for open-source motivation.
5 min · 1,231 words
Gentoo developer Michał Górny asks Python package maintainers not to adopt uv-build as their build backend, arguing that its size and Rust toolchain requirement break builds on less common architectures and downstream distributions, while its benefits over backends like flit-core or hatchling are minimal.
3 min · 579 words
Chasing a -O2 pessimization in antcc
The author of the antcc C compiler investigates why a Lua benchmark ran slower at -O1 and -O2 than unoptimized, digging into the interpreter dispatch loop, register allocation, SSA phi handling and stack slots to find and fix the optimization that made the code worse.
12 min · 2,750 words
purplesyringa investigates vfmaddrnd231pd, an FMA instruction with per-instruction rounding control documented in Intel's 2024 Software Development Manual that the GNU assembler doesn't recognize, whose documented intrinsics are missing from Clang and ICC, and that has vanished from the 2026 SDM.
2 min · 415 words
An incomplete list of incompatibilities between C as written in the ISO standard and C as it exists for people using gcc/clang with glibc/musl, covering the asm keyword, FLT_ROUNDS, standard floating-point pragmas, and other places where real toolchains are not conformant by default.
4 min · 986 words
Parsing JSON at tens of gigabytes per second… in Python
Daniel Lemire benchmarks JSON parsing on free-threaded Python 3.14 using eight hours of GH Archive events (7.6 GB), comparing the standard json module, orjson, msgspec and his fastsimdjson library across up to 64 threads, and shows Python can reach tens of gigabytes per second.
3 min · 789 words
Writing a Demoscene Intro for the ZX Spectrum
Mark Dastmalchi-Round walks through tools, techniques and challenges of writing a retro ZX Spectrum demoscene crack intro, covering the pipeline from assets to a runnable production.
31 min · 7,074 words
Living in the Weimar era of Ruby
Julik Tarkhanov responds to DHH's RailsWorld vibe-coding keynote, arguing that celebrity disinterest in Rails does not obligate the community to abandon it, and framing a freer, post-celebrity chapter for Ruby.
13 min · 2,998 words
Speeding up the Unreal editor by… not using unnecessarily secure hash methods
A profiling write-up finding that Unreal Engine's editor launch hashes full shader source files with cryptographically secure SHA-1, and how switching to the engine's existing xxHash implementation sped this up, plus notes on preparing the change as a pull request.
4 min · 986 words
Type-safe HTML templating in Zig
Lukáš Lalinský describes a type-safe HTML templating approach in Zig, drawing on decades of server-side templating experience and showing how Zig's type system can catch markup mistakes at compile time.
5 min · 1,168 words
I can't use generic lambdas at compile-time, now what?
Braden Ganetsky follows up his 'Break MSVC and Clang' post with a deep dive into working around a Clang bug that blocks using generic lambdas in constant evaluation, explaining how he got a compile-time C++ technique to work on Clang 16 onward.
16 min · 3,598 words
nobloat/poll – designing a minimal poll tool
After a frustrating Doodle experience, the author builds nobloat/poll: a self-hostable, single-binary Doodle alternative in plain Go with no external dependencies, and walks through link-based ownership without signup, calendar invites, proof-of-work spam protection, JSON-file storage instead of a database, reliable mail sending, and shrinking the binary.
13 min · 2,884 words
What we ended up doing about alias propagation
A follow-up from the Futhark programming language blog on how the open questions about alias propagation in Futhark's type checker were resolved, covering the rules adopted for functions, tuples and uniqueness types, the formalisation work, and remaining imprecision in the compiler implementation.
8 min · 1,940 words
A practical introduction to arena allocators in C: what they are, why grouping allocations into one region makes memory management faster and less leak-prone, and a step-by-step personal implementation with code, plus the trade-offs of using them.
9 min · 2,184 words
Valen's Memory Safety: A New Kind of Borrow Checking
Evan Ovadia introduces the flexible borrow checker in the Valen programming language, where references remember which part of a data structure they point into, so mutations elsewhere don't invalidate them, and walks through examples comparing it with Rust's borrow checking.
27 min · 6,247 words
Fetching AMD SEV Reports (With Zig)
A walkthrough of AMD SEV-SNP attestation: what confidential VMs protect against, how to retrieve a signed attestation report on Linux and through Coconut SVSM and OpenHCL, and how to verify its certificate chain and validate it against expected policy using a Zig library.
4 min · 969 words