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Visualizing Rust's Vtables: How dyn Trait Works In Memory
A Rust learner coming from C++ examines how dynamic dispatch works in memory, contrasting Rust's wide pointer approach, a data pointer paired with a vtable pointer, with C++'s in-object vtable pointer. The post also explores zero-sized types, object safety rules, and the specific situations where dynamic dispatch is necessary.
1 min · 299 wordsagent-written
Goroutine Leak ProfilesGo 1.27 adds profiles that find goroutines waiting forever for something that will never happen
Vlad Saioc explains Go 1.27’s new goroutine leak profiles: how the runtime detects permanently blocked goroutines, what the profiles show, and how to use them to debug concurrency bugs that goroutine dumps alone miss.
20 min · 4,690 words
This Month in Redox - August 2026
# This Month in Redox - August 2026 ##### By Ribbon and Ron Williams on Redox OS is a complete Unix-like general-purpose microkernel-based operating system written in Rust. August was a very exciting month for Redox! Here’s all the latest news. Sorry for the delayed report, a combination of busy development, time off, conference attendance, other work, and various random factors got in the way. ## Donate to Redox If you would like to support Redox, please consider donating or buying some merch! - Donate - Patreon - Merch has moved from Teespring to Amaze Commerce:…
9 min · 2,040 words
Inside Forge: Writing a Container Runtime From Scratch
A from-scratch walkthrough of Forge, a container runtime built in Go on Linux primitives—covering namespaces, cgroups, rootfs setup, and lessons from building the runtime by hand.
16 min · 3,673 words
Testing WebGPU data layouts with Facet
Matt Keeter shows how Facet reflection plus naga lets Rust unit tests catch WGSL/Rust struct layout mismatches—padding on mat3x3, dynamic arrays, and field offsets—before GPU hangs force a reboot.
6 min · 1,444 words
What Zig felt like, coming from Rust
A Rust developer's first real Zig project: how the language feels for systems work—manual memory, comptime, error handling, and where it differs from Rust's ownership model and tooling.
11 min · 2,535 words
Reverse Engineering the iPod Classic's Undocumented Mikey Chip
My iPod Classic (7th gen) runs Rockbox, and I love almost everything about that arrangement. But the inline remote on Apple’s wired earbuds (the center play/pause button and the volume clicker) did nothing. Never has, for anyone running Rockbox on this family of iPods. ``` /* TODO: * - detect jack accessory * - support for remote buttons */ ``` And honestly, fair enough. Rockbox on this iPod exists because volunteers reverse engineered Apple hardware with zero documentation, for free, since January 2011. Music, clickwheel, recording, all of it figured out the hard way.…
12 min · 2,803 words
A playful but carefully argued encoding proposal that extends UTF-8 to arbitrary length while preserving ASCII compatibility and self-synchronization, with a reference pipx implementation.
89 min · 20,405 words
Simulating Airband AM Radios Warning: Contains many annoying sounds. In a slight departure from my usual code monkey content, let’s talk about airplanes! And radios!
15 min · 3,432 words
Thomas Neumann explains why classic lock coupling scales poorly on many-core CPUs because of physical contention on the root lock, how Optimistic Lock Coupling lets readers validate version numbers instead of writing, and how a C++ lock guard can encode validation in the type system so the compiler catches missed checks.
5 min · 1,105 words
Comparison of Arena Architecture in malloc()
When multiple threads simultaneously allocate or deallocate memory from the allocator, the allocator will serialize them. Programs making intensive use of the allocator actually slow down as the number of processors increases.
8 min · 1,880 words
Type Safe Generic Data Structures in C
Daniel Hooper shows a technique for type-safe generic data structures in plain C that uses unions to attach type information to a generic container, building up from a basic linked list and comparing it with macro and void-pointer approaches so the compiler catches type errors at call sites.
7 min · 1,691 words
A Mere Mortal's Introduction to JIT Vulnerabilities in JavaScript Engines
Josiah Pierce demystifies JavaScript engine JIT bugs for mere mortals: how speculative optimization creates exploitable gaps, with a grounded intro to engine architecture and vulnerability patterns.
34 min · 7,849 words
Software sandboxing: The basics
A deep primer on software sandboxing: threat models, OS mechanisms, and practical patterns for isolating untrusted code—foundational reading for secure systems and agent runtimes.
39 min · 9,084 words
Matt Keeter writes a hand-tuned AArch64 assembly interpreter for the Uxn virtual machine and finds it about 30 percent faster than his safe-Rust baseline, explaining why dispatch dominates interpreter time, how keeping VM state in registers and per-opcode dispatch help, and follow-up experiments from readers.
16 min · 3,656 words
Alex Kladov (matklad) argues that swapping std's Mutex for a spinlock to add no_std support in Rust crates is an anti-pattern, walking through how spinlocks work, priority inversion, CPU interrupts and why a spinning lock can deadlock, and proposes alternatives such as panicking when blocking is impossible.
9 min · 2,000 words
Language Interoperability From the Ground UpOriginal article link with an AI-written directory summary
A bottom-up explanation of how code written in different languages can work together. Sam Rose develops the mechanisms behind language bindings through hands-on examples rather than treating interoperability as a black box.
1 min · 77 wordsagent-written
A practical guide to writing C++ that actually uses the machine well—covering language and hardware basics, common pitfalls, and habits that keep hot paths fast without premature micro-optimization theater.
17 min · 3,904 words
Gallery of Processor Cache Effects
Igor Ostrovsky's classic 2010 post uses short C# code samples to illustrate how processor caches shape real program performance: memory access patterns, cache lines, L1 and L2 sizes, instruction-level parallelism, cache associativity, false sharing of cache lines, and hardware quirks that are hard to explain.
12 min · 2,685 words