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.

In functional programming,
combinator libraries refer to a design style that emphasizes bottom-up program construction.
Such libraries define a few core data types
and provide constructors—functions that create initial objects—and combinators—functions that build larger objects from smaller pieces.

Combinators enable the programmer to use intuitive visual and spatial reasoning
that’s vastly more powerful than linear language processing.
As a result, solving problems with combinators feels like playing with lego pieces.

zb is a tool for reproducibly building software, similar to Bazel.
(See the comparison page if you’re curious to know the differences.)
When a software build process is reproducible,
it will produce the exact same output
when given the same inputs.
Reproducibility is a desirable property for a software build process to have:
it simplifies debugging,
it enables build speed-ups,
and it is essential for digital supply chain security.
However, reproducibility is a difficult goal to achieve.

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

Solving AoC on the DS with Rust.

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

Living specification of the IRC protocol. Does not include brand new behavior, just existing behavior present in IRC software and/or networks (new extensions are IRCv3's area).

Hare is a systems programming language designed to be simple, stable, and robust. Hare uses a static type system, manual memory management, and a minimal runtime. It is well-suited to writing operating systems, system tools, compilers, networking software, and other low-level, high performance tasks.