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The Shift of Theseus — Toy Bit Provenance Abstract Domain
CF Bolz-Tereick extends PyPy's Toy Optimizer with a bit provenance abstract domain that tracks where each bit of a value came from, letting the JIT recognize shifts, masks and identities across instruction sequences that a known-bits domain misses, with transfer functions, rewrite extraction and an evaluation on Pydrofoil and PyPy.
25 min · 5,858 words
Billion-query-per-second lookup tables in C++
Daniel Lemire shows how to replace std::unordered_map for small, compile-time-known string sets (HTTP methods, headers, keywords) with a constexpr perfect hash, cutting each lookup to a single comparison and about five cycles, and shares a single-header C++ library and benchmarks built with Francisco Geiman Thiesen of Microsoft.
5 min · 1,221 words
Stalwart v1.0: The Fastest Mail Server on the Planet
Stalwart's maintainer announces v1.0 of the Rust mail and collaboration server five years after its first commit, focused on performance work (SIMD/SWAR parser rewrites, profiling-driven optimisation, benchmarks) and finalising the on-disk data format.
14 min · 3,170 words
Alfie John recalls growing up before the mainstream internet, trading pirated games on floppies, discovering BBSes and the demoscene's cracktros, and finding Denthor of ASPHYXIA's VGA demo trainer tutorials in Turbo Pascal, which made him decide he wanted to make demos and become a programmer.
4 min · 1,017 words
writing about pratt parsing so I remember it
A hands-on walkthrough of Pratt parsing for C expressions: why it rarely shows up in standard compiler courses, how binding power handles precedence and associativity, and how prefix, infix and postfix subroutines keep the parser core small, with pointers to Crafting Interpreters.
5 min · 1,260 words
Thorsten Ball's weekly link roundup, written after two weeks in New York and San Francisco: a new Raising An Agent episode on how Amp operates, notes from a talk to an investment bank on using coding agents, and commentary on AI, software and writing links including Dan Luu on ambitious software.
8 min · 1,937 words
GOTO Considered Totally Sick (for error handling in C)
Returning to C after years of Go and Zig, the author misses defer and errdefer, and after reading John Carmack's emails on inlined code shows how a single goto cleanup label makes C error handling simpler: resource cleanup lives in one place at the end of the function instead of being duplicated at every failure point, the same centralized-exit pattern the Linux kernel coding style recommends.
5 min · 1,204 words
Decompiling Fast Food Tycoon 2: Drawing the World
Andrew Healey decompiles the 2001 business sim Fast Food Tycoon 2 (Pizza Connection 2) to show how it rendered its detailed isometric cities: the overworld map, lighting, the animated cast of citizens, branch interiors, and the hidden simulation details behind them.
7 min · 1,551 words
Building Java ME Apps with Modern Tooling
ROllerozxa walks through building Java ME (J2ME) apps for old feature phones with modern tooling: OpenJDK 8, MicroEmulator stub JARs for the CLDC 1.1 and MIDP 2.0 APIs, compiling with javac, packaging the JAR, preverifying with ProGuard, getting it onto a phone, and the platform's limitations.
7 min · 1,668 words
Introducing the HTML-in-Canvas API origin trial
Chrome announces an origin trial for the experimental HTML-in-Canvas API, which lets developers draw live DOM content into a 2D canvas or WebGL/WebGPU texture while keeping it interactive and accessible, with examples, use cases and resources.
9 min · 1,983 words
The Hibernate Origin Story (Outsider Edition)
Charles Miller recounts, as a bystander in the room, how the Hibernate Java persistence library grew out of work at Sydney company Cirrus Technologies around 2001, why its root package was cirrus.inf, and how it came to be released under the LGPL.
5 min · 1,066 words
The glorious @xkcdRandom Zig builtin
Adolfo Ochagavía forks the Zig compiler to add a tongue-in-cheek @xkcdRandom builtin that always returns 4, using the joke as a hands-on tour of how Zig builtins are declared, analyzed, and lowered inside the compiler.
3 min · 605 words
OrgWebAlchemy: Benchmarking, Profiling, and the Long Road to Real Org Support
Josep Bigorra details how the Guile OrgWebAlchemy Org-mode parser gained Markdown output, figures, named elements and table rows, and got up to 6.4x faster after profiling uncovered a quadratic collapse pass and a per-character scanner.
26 min · 6,059 words
Software is slow because of bad design, not slow languages
Sean Goedecke argues that rewriting programs in C or Rust (with or without AI) rarely makes them much faster: most software is I/O-bound, slow languages already delegate hot paths to fast libraries, and real speedups come from redesign.
5 min · 1,229 words
Debunking "Faster than Rust": Malicious Benchmarks in Tov
Fyra Labs examines three benchmarks behind claims that the Tov language (TypeScript-like, compiled via C) beats Rust, argues they are crafted to slow Rust down, and shows improved Rust versions match or beat Tov.
12 min · 2,655 words
Reverse engineering a Beyblade launch tracker
Simone Marzulli describes getting hooked on Beyblade X, then reverse engineering the Beybattle Pass launch tracker: sniffing its Bluetooth traffic, decoding the payloads that record each launch's RPM, and building DiZZi 0.2, an AI companion app inspired by the anime with a spinning 3D bey and voice callouts.
17 min · 3,852 words
Attention people who think UB is fine
Thomas Habets follows up his post on undefined behaviour in C with a concrete example showing that UB is not 'at worst a segfault': the same line can run whatever is next in memory, write a random value and crash, or do what you naively expect.
3 min · 609 words
How close can pure FP get to C?
Richard Feldman takes up the lean-zip versus libdeflate result and explores how far a DEFLATE implementation in Roc, a pure functional language, can be pushed toward C performance, with benchmarks, compiler work, and reproduction scripts.
41 min · 9,413 words
Nick of Code and Cake shares surprising lessons from starting a hobby container runtime: containers are just restricted processes built from several Linux kernel features, images are just folders, Go is awkward for a runtime, and rootless networking must be reimplemented in userspace.
2 min · 490 words
kqr of Entropic Thoughts shows how to use a Nix flake on any Linux distribution to manage a simple script's dependencies, packaging a Python text-to-speech script as a binary and then adapting the approach to other languages.
8 min · 1,907 words