Cap'n Web is a new open source, JavaScript-native RPC protocol for use in browsers and web servers. It provides the expressive power of Cap'n Proto, but with no schemas and no boilerplate.

We recently ran across a strange higgs-bugson that manifested itself in a critical system that stores and distributes the firm’s trading activity data, called Gord. (A higgs-bugson is a bug that is reported in practice but difficult to reproduce, named for the Higgs boson, a particle which was theorized in the 1960s but only found in 2013.) In this post I’ll walk you through the process I took to debug it. I tried to write down relevant details as they came up, so see if you can guess what the bug is while reading along.

I feel uneasy about design patterns.
On the one hand, my university class on design patterns revived my interest in programming.
On the other hand, I find most patterns in the Gang of Four book to be irrelevant to my daily work;
they solve problems that a choice of programming language or paradigm creates.

My litmus test of a good design pattern is its cross-disciplinary applicability.
I’m more likely to accept an idea that pops up in fields beyond software engineering.
And the most convincing patterns are the ones that help me in everyday life.

This article describes a universal pattern that billions of people rely on daily, but software engineers rarely discuss—the plan-execute pattern.

This post is all about speculative compilation, or just speculation for short, in the context of the JavaScriptCore virtual machine.

Every so often I come across a paper, blog post, or (occasionally) video that completely changes how I think about a topic in programming languages and compilers. For some of these posts, I can’t even remember how I thought about the idea before reading it—it was that impactful.

Reading through the Emacs 30 NEWS file and picking
out the stuff I think is the most interesting.

This blog series creates a small operating system in the Rust programming language. Each post is a small tutorial and includes all needed code.

There's a concept that I've heard called by a lot of different names, but my favorite name for it is …

A lightning post on logic programming in Haskell to construct a workout weekly schedule given the set of exercises, days and constraints.

I’ve used a lot of tools over the years, which means I’ve seen a lot of tools hit a plateau. That’s not always a problem; sometimes …

Most functional languages rely on some garbage collection for automatic memory management. They usually eschew reference counting in favor of a tracing garbage collector, which has less bookkeeping overhead at runtime. On the other hand, having an exact reference count of each value can enable optimizations, such as destructive updates. We explore these optimization opportunities in the context of an eager, purely functional programming language. We propose a new mechanism for efficiently reclaiming memory used by nonshared values, reducing stress on the global memory allocator. We describe an approach for minimizing the number of reference counts updates using borrowed references and a heuristic for automatically inferring borrow annotations. We implemented all these techniques in a new compiler for an eager and purely functional programming language with support for multi-threading. Our preliminary experimental results demonstrate our approach is competitive and often outperforms state-of-the-art compilers.