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Everything filed under Systems Programming, newest first.
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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
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
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
Hillel Wayne cools the hype that TLA+ will save AI coding agents, clarifying what temporal logic model checking can and cannot verify in real software systems.
7 min · 1,632 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
The systems that no one will test
The systems that no one will test This happened to me in 2020, and it has been on my mind again lately. During the worst of the pandemic, I found a vulnerability in a system that gave me access to the Brazilian federal system, and with that access I was able to retrieve information on any Brazilian (think of 200+ million people data).
4 min · 901 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
Hard Stop: Kernel-Level Preemption and Containment for Rogue Agentic Execution
A research write-up proposing Dual-Sided Andon: out-of-band, kernel-boundary preemption and containment for runaway AI agents, arguing application-level kill switches are insufficient.
21 min · 4,848 words
Digital Audio on the ZX Spectrum's 1-Bit Beeper
Michael Martin wraps a ZX Spectrum series with a practical write-up on coaxing high-quality digital audio from the machine's 1-bit beeper—covering techniques, trade-offs, and surprisingly good results on every Spectrum model.
21 min · 4,768 words
Dissecting House of Apple 2 on modern glibc
An interactive GDB walkthrough of House of Apple 2 on glibc 2.43: FSOP past vtable checks, wide-stream arbitrary call, stack pivot, and ROP—with a follow-along lab.
2 min · 383 words
Reverse-engineering the vintage Intel 8087's tangent algorithm: more than CORDIC
Ken Shirriff reverse-engineers the Intel 8087's tangent microcode and shows why the chip's approach goes beyond classic CORDIC—covering range reduction, the argument reduction trick, and what the die reveals about 1980s floating-point design.
32 min · 7,343 words
Infecting the Steam Link with NixOS
While rummaging through my closet the other day I discovered a [Steam Link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steam_Link Hardware_device) I had bought on flash sale way back in 2018 still dutifully humming away all these years later. It occured to me that having an always on low power Arm device with Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, and several USB ports would be handy, so thus began my journey to get NixOS running on the Steam Link.
13 min · 2,996 words
Go concurrency distilled This mini book provides a brief overview of many concurrency topics in Go. Each topic comes with interactive examples — feel free to experiment with them by changing the code and clicking Run . There's also a [PDF version](https://github.com/nalgeon/go conc distilled) with static examples. This is a quick refresher on Go concurrency, not a beginner's guide.
28 min · 6,445 words
C's Flexible Integer Sizes Were Not a Design Mistake
Gustavo Pezzi defends C’s platform-sized integers: how 12–60-bit machines shaped int, why minimum ranges beat fixed widths, and what Lua’s portable C still teaches.
2 min · 486 words
NetBSD: Playing with disklabels
A hands-on walkthrough of NetBSD disklabels for someone coming from Linux/DOS: how labels are structured, how to inspect and edit them safely, and the gotchas when partitioning disks the BSD way.
7 min · 1,633 words
The state of SIMD in Rust in 2026
A lot of progress was made since last year, and I made some of it! After [last year's survey](https://shnatsel.medium.com/the state of simd in rust in 2025 32c263e5f53d) I started contributing to the SIMD library that seemed the most promising. One thing led to another, and now I'm a maintainer of Fearless SIMD. To avoid a conflict of interest, I invited authors of other libraries ( std::simd , wide , pulp , macerator ) to review and provide feedback on a draft of this article.
25 min · 5,668 words
Crazy as it sounds to say this, since it’s all anybody’s been able to talk about for over a year, but the impact of AI on computing hasn’t yet sunk in.
6 min · 1,349 words
CVE-2025-13032: Entering and Breaking the Avast Antivirus Sandbox Part 2
SAFA’s second part turns Avast’s CVE-2025-13032 double-fetch into a local privilege escalation to SYSTEM on Windows 11 via paged pool overflow and RegBuffers corruption for arbitrary kernel R/W.
13 min · 3,096 words
One CPU Atomic Instruction, One Packaging Infinite Loop: The Story of the Lost Update on LA664
Jie Ge documents a Loongson LA664 erratum where an atomic instruction can lose updates, how it surfaced as an infinite packaging loop, the root cause analysis, and what it means for correctness on that CPU.
14 min · 3,163 words
It is with great sadness that we share the news of the passing of Johannes Doerfert, on September 17, 2026, at the age of 36, after a battle with cancer. Johannes was one of the most prolific and respected contributors to the LLVM compiler project, and his loss will be deeply felt.
5 min · 1,239 words