I have recently done some performance work and realized that reading about my experience could be entertaining. Teaching to think is just as important as teaching to code, but this is seldom done; I think something I’ve done last month is a great opportunity to draw the curtain a bit. serde is the Rust framework for...

Rust’s approach to error handling comes at a cost. The Result type often doesn’t fit in CPU registers, and callers of fallible functions have to check whether the returned value is Ok or Err. That’s a stack spill, a comparison, a branch, and a lot of error handling code intertwined with the hot path that just...

The sentinel trick underlies a data structure with the following requirements: Read element by index in O(1), Write element by index in O(1), Replace all elements with a given value in O(1). It is not a novel technique by any means, but it doesn’t seem on everyone’s lips, so some of you might find it interesting.

$ </dev/urandom base64 | base64 | base64 | base64 | base64 | base64 | base64 | base64 | base64 \ | base64 | base64 | base64 | base64 | base64 | base64 | base64 | base64 | base64 | base64 \ | base64 | head -1 Vm0wd2QyUXlVWGxWV0d4V1YwZDRWMVl3WkRSV01WbDNXa1JTVjAxV2JETlhhMUpUVmpBeFYySkVU $ </dev/urandom base64 | base64...

blazingio cuts corners by design. It keeps the constant factor small and uses long forgotten algorithms people used before processors supported SIMD and integer division. But another limitation made this task much harder. Size. Professional libraries start exceeding the Codeforces limit of 64 KiB really fast. Code...

ZeroNet is a decentralized network that enables dynamic sites, such as blogs and forums, unlike popular content-addressed storage networks that came later. Sites aren’t addressed by immutable hashes; instead, site updates are signed by Bitcoin addresses. A moot point is that Bitcoin addresses are case-sensitive, and...