Topic
Everything filed under Systems Programming, newest first.
RSS · JSON · All topics
The Golden Spike, and Resurrecting the Vale(n) Programming Language
Evan Ovadia describes patching rustc so Valen can call Rust generics, implement Rust traits from Valen closures, and borrow-check across the boundary—true Rust interop beyond the C ABI.
17 min · 3,809 words
Needed 1+1, Built a Functional Programming LanguageFrom a data-structures homework tree to closures, a chunk allocator, and a mark-and-sweep GC in C
A playful systems write-up: starting from evaluating 1+1 as a binary tree, the author builds a graph-reduction language in C with closures, a chunk allocator, and a garbage collector that cuts fib(40) from 12GB to 1.7MB.
2 min · 422 words
Size-Specialized Memory Allocation
Go 1.27 includes faster memory allocation for allocations of 80 bytes or fewer. Allocations can be up to 20-30% faster, making allocation-heavy programs up to 1% faster. The Go runtime improves the performance of those allocations by adding specialized functions that are used to allocate certain sizes. These specialized functions can then make certain assumptions that make them faster and easier to optimize. This blog post will explain how this works and how it makes your programs faster. Heap allocations are created by the runtime’s mallocgc function, which requires the…
7 min · 1,560 words
Why building a Rust LSP is hard
A deep dive into why implementing a Rust language server is unusually hard: incremental analysis, macro expansion, borrow checking at IDE latency, and lessons from building Rust Glancer alongside rust-analyzer.
26 min · 6,056 words
C++26: Trivial infinite loops are no longer undefined behaviour
Sandor Dargo explains P2809R3: before C++26, empty while(true); loops were UB under forward-progress rules (Clang could delete them). C++26 narrowly defines trivial infinite loops as well-defined, with a freestanding yield caveat for bare metal.
4 min · 920 words
Subnormal floating-point numbers are expensive… on Intel processors
Daniel Lemire benchmarks IEEE subnormal floating-point performance across Intel Granite/Emerald Rapids, AMD Zen 5, AWS Graviton 5, and Apple M4 Max, finding ~45–50× slower multiplies on Intel while AMD and Arm stay near full speed.
2 min · 466 words
Principles for fast Tokio applications
A practical guide to building low-latency, high-throughput applications on the Tokio async runtime, written from experience debugging real production systems. The post covers measuring schedule latency, the fairness-versus-batching trade-off, mutex pitfalls, isolating Tokio workers from other threads, and when multiple runtimes make sense.
1 min · 295 wordsagent-written
A Search-and-Inference Database from Scratch in Pure Zig
Antfly recounts rewriting their Go retrieval engine in Zig while still early: first-principles design, caring about the model over embeddings, TigerBeetle-style simulation testing, and what they learned.
12 min · 2,793 words
Why Your Linux Kernel Starts With 'MZ' (Yes, the DOS/PE One)
A deep dive into why the Linux kernel image begins with the DOS/PE 'MZ' header—boot compatibility history, EFI stubs, and what the legacy magic bytes still do on modern systems.
9 min · 2,082 words
Guest Post: Rust Is Tier-1 Language at Microsoft
Victor Ciura from Microsoft DevDiv announces that Rust has achieved Tier-1 language status at Microsoft, meaning it now has a fully paved path from local development to production. The post introduces rustc_codegen_utc, a new Rust code-generation backend that connects the Rust compiler to Microsoft's native MSVC toolchain.
1 min · 244 wordsagent-written
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
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