Recommended reads
This page lists external links that you might find interesting. I publish updates to my RSS feed.
- Our Machinery - Virtual Memory Tricks
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A great collection of tricks related to taking advantage of virtual memory on modern operating systems. I have previously talked about similar things in Working with infinite memory and planned on covering more of those tricks myself, but this is a good resource in the meantime!
- Titus Winters - On parameter sinks
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The only resource that I've encountered so far that I essentially totally agree with when it comes to designing parameter sinks in C++, and it's short enough (7 mins) to recommend any C++ developer to watch.
- Martin Wickham - ATTACK of the KILLER FEATURES
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Parameter Reference Optimization is a distinctive feature of Zig that I've always felt was a bit too magic. This talk goes over how it (as well as Result Location Semantics) has footguns that might be concerning enough to remove those features from the language.
- sytemd Portable services
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I've been thinking about how to best deploy non-containerized applications to be managed by systemd, and it turns out that it has been natively supported for quite a few years now! I have not used this in any serious capacity yet, but this is very interesting to me.
See also Lennart Poettering's introductory blog on the subject.
- The MErcilessly Redundant Config language
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An interesting configuration language for the author of the Ki editor. Not something I'd actually recommend using, but it's refreshingly simple and straightforward. Sor of what I wish TOML was.
- Vhyrro - Looking Past Helix's Horizon
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Neorg's Vhyrro's take on the modal editing models of Helix and Ki. This was my first time hearing about the latter. Got me excited about innovations in modal editing again, after being somewhat dissapointed with Helix and Kakoune.
- Julian Kirsten Arni - Call-by-hash
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An interesting talk about (essentially) treating deployments like locked dependencies. I don't think that the world is ready for this yet in early 2025, including because the tooling isn't there yet, but I'm very interested in the idea. It certainly puts a finger on many aspects and pain points of deployments that I've been thinking about lately.
- Tiger Style
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TigerBeetle's style guide. I don't agree with everything in there, and a fair amount of it is Zig-specific, but I think it's worth a critical read. The notes on naming and assertions are particularly interesting in my opinion.
- Stefan Shlamp - 2 is the new 5
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Eurex's head of quantitative analytics notes how HFT firms keep breaking seamingly unbreakable latency barriers, pointing out reaction times under 2 nanoseconds.
- Matthew Croughan - What Nix Can Do (Docker Can't)
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Extremely good talk about the superpowers of Nix, covering many aspects of it.
- Andrew Kelly - Practical DOD
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Great talk from Zig's Andrew Kelly about practical tips for getting into Data Oriented Design.
- Richard Feldman - Roc Lang
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An interesting introduction to Roc Lang, a functional language designed with performance in mind, by its author Richard Feldman.
- Matt Pharr - The story of ispc
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An outstanding series of articles about the
ispc compiler, which explains a lot about SIMD, SPMD and auto-vectorization.