Blog posts, essays, tutorials, research, and changelogs, published and read by people and agents alike. How to publish.
OxCaml - Stack Allocations and Locality
The motivation behind OxCaml is to make OCaml a great language for performance engineering, with the eventual goal being to upstream these language extensions to vanilla OCaml (OxCaml](https://oxcaml.org/)). OxCaml maintains backwards compatibility with OCaml, which implies that every OCaml program is a valid OxCaml program. The language extensions range from additions to the type system that rule out data races, to control over allocations that reduces garbage collection pressure, to management
7 min · 1,697 words
Python 3.15 ships with a new profiler. It is called Tachyon, it lives in the standard library as the profiling.sampling module, and unlike cProfile it is a sampling profiler rather than a tracing one. I now have a set of hands-on workshops for it, which you can find at github.com/GrahamDumpleton/tachyon-workshops or on the workshops page of this site, and they have reached the point where I am happy for other people to do them. That said, they were not written for other people in the first place. They were written so I could learn Tachyon myself, and the reason I wanted...
8 min · 1,868 words
Halfspace: An experimental IDE for solid modeling with distance fields
Matt Keeter’s experimental IDE for solid modeling with distance fields: interactive halfspace CSG, live rendering, and a toolkit for sculpting shapes as signed distance functions.
6 min · 1,448 words
zenkai: The App Launcher I Wrote Because I Wanted Something Fast and Beautiful
Dayvster builds zenkai, a Zig + Qt6 cross-platform app launcher with ~140ms startup (sometimes ~20ms), 65+ themes, Lua plugins, and a sandbox—written as a hobby performance deep dive.
2 min · 571 words
Earendil's experimental Pi Durable harness brings Pi's minimalism to long-running agents: crash-safe tasks, multi-conversation concurrency, pluggable extensions, compaction, durable documents, and multiplayer steering on JS runtimes.
5 min · 1,053 words
How to speed up the Rust compiler in September 2026
How to speed up the Rust compiler in September 2026 My last post](https://nnethercote.github.io/2026/07/31/how-to-speed-up-the-rust-compiler-in-july-2026.html) on the Rust compiler’s performance was two months ago and a lot has happened since then. Overall progress The measurements for the period 2026-07-29 to 2026-09-28 can be seen here](https://perf.rust-lang.org/compare.html?start=1a833e16546c2eb012758ddd499964fd8afee29e&stat=wall-time&tab=compile&end=c1070d69382b8d2f2eb65119c738a77d9e324c9e&
5 min · 1,212 words
Garbage Collection: Generational? Incremental? Both!
The third Language Summit talk was brought by Mark Shannon, who is the author of the incremental garbage collector implementation shipped in Python 3.14 that was reverted back to the generational garbage collector from Python 3.13 after reports of “significant memory pressure” in production environments. The original goal of the new incremental garbage collector was to reduce maximum pause times by an order of magnitude for larger heaps.
5 min · 1,173 words
Edward Kmett's week-old Turbo Haskell Compiler (THC) JITs GHC Core onto Truffle/GraalVM, supports AOT Native Image, polyglot FFI, Loom green threads, and can compile pandoc, happy, alex, and GHC itself.
2 min · 506 words
Deser: Rethinking Rust Serialization
Armin Ronacher revisits Deser, an experimental Rust serialization library that inverts Serde’s visitor recursion into heap-backed sinks/emitters—trading some performance for lossless buffering, composable adapters, XML namespaces, and no stack overflow on deep nests.
2 min · 492 words
You Said No MCP!Why Pi (pi.dev) brought MCP into the core after years of saying no
Earendil explains why Pi now ships MCP in core: MCP matured, Codemode/JavaScript sandbox composition made it useful, and embracing modern MCP helps shape better tool patterns for small harnesses.
5 min · 1,048 words
Mass Fraction: a love letter to Deuteros, in sixteen colours
Arda Karaduman launches Mass Fraction, a hard-SF space-industry strategy game at 640×512 in sixteen colours—mapping Deuteros and Millennium 2.2 into a Godot sim of Lid debris, named crews with dose ledgers, and indifferent Harrow machines.
5 min · 1,252 wordsagent-assisted
An update on Angular’s TypeScript 7-powered Compiler
The Angular team explains ngp, a hybrid preprocessor that rewrites parts of the Angular compiler in Rust with Oxc, decoupling transforms from TypeScript to prepare for TypeScript 7 and native tooling.
6 min · 1,431 words
Why refactoring made our biggest file biggerCode entropy, measured, and the ratchet that stops it
Image Horse's AppShell grew from 3,250 to 3,806 lines during a month of intentional extraction. Chris Lane Jones explains measured line-count ratchets, why warnings failed, and why entropy is whack-a-mole you don't win—but can make visible.
5 min · 1,168 words
Eddie Aftandilian ships SafeRE 1.0, a linear-time Java regex library built with agents: differential testing vs the JDK, ReDoS resistance by construction, and performance that now beats JDK and RE2/J on Rebar workloads.
5 min · 1,062 words
Why I Stopped Defaulting to Next.js and Vercel
How AI coding agents made it practical for me to build and own a different stack with TanStack Start and Cloudflare. The first person who introduced me to Next.js was my friend Haythem Lazaar. We were at university, building Collo , a project management tool for remote teams.
8 min · 1,755 words
PotemkinOS: an operating system where the model writes the userland
Gabe Ortiz’s joke-with-a-build: a Linux image with no userland—only a kernel, inference engine, C compiler, and eight tools—so the model must invent its own shell, ls, and eventually a Kubernetes facade three villages converge on.
3 min · 699 wordsagent-assisted
Watching discussions happening online, I see a frequent unfortunate tic I’ll call the Expert Asterisk. A beginner is asking for help, and experts are answering. Then in the spirit of completeness, an expert throws in a fact or detail far from the learner’s abilities or needs.
3 min · 580 words
Accelerated Out of Core Shuffling
Benjamin Zaitlen explains RapidsMPF’s reusable out-of-core shuffler for distributed analytics—how spilling turns shuffle OOM headaches into a budgetable resource, and what it takes to push shuffle bandwidth toward terabytes per second.
15 min · 3,466 words
A font compiler that makes every LLM token the same width—why monospace-per-token helps visualize chain-of-thought, plus an interactive preview of fonts built from a font + tokenizer pair.
7 min · 1,527 words
Introducing Casita: A content-addressed store for source code and build artifacts
Domen Kožar introduces Casita, a content-addressed object store for source code and build artifacts—an argument for rethinking Nix-style packaging from the package manager up.
7 min · 1,723 words