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.

An overview of what makes modern CSS so awesome.

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.

The solution to all of these problems

I humbly put forward that modern web development provides us all the utilities to move away from class names and implement something much more robust, with some fairly straightforward changes:

Attributes

Attributes allow us to parameterise a component using a key-value representation, very similar to Map<string, T>. Browsers come with a wealth of selector functions to parse the values of an attribute.

I have a lot of thoughts about the design of compiler intermediate representations (IRs). In this post I’m going to try and communicate some of those ideas and why I think they are important.

Solving AoC on the DS with Rust.

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

A somewhat compact implementation of the awk programming language

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

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.

Using systemd to avoid having to write some risky code

Featureful zsh prompt.

A single-user “wiki” engine powering the ThoughtStorms wiki.

In this article, you will learn how to install and configure OpenBSD to reduce its network activity over clearnet