Go’s interfaces are very funny. Rather than being explicitly implemented, like in Java or Rust, they are simply a collection of methods (a “method set”) that the concrete type must happen to have. This is called structural typing, which is the opposite of nominal typing.| mcyoung.xyz
Historically I have worked on many projects related to high-performance Protobuf, be that on the C++ runtime, on the Rust runtime, or on integrating UPB, the fastest Protobuf runtime, written by my colleague Josh Haberman. I generally don’t post directly about my current job, but my most recent toy-turned-product is something I’m very excited to write about: hyperpb.| mcyoung.xyz
Historically I have worked on many projects related to high-performance Protobuf, be that on the C++ runtime, on the Rust runtime, or on integrating UPB, the fastest Protobuf runtime, written by my colleague Josh Haberman. I generally don’t post directly about my current job, but my most recent toy-turned-product is something I’m very excited to write about: hyperpb.| mcyoung.xyz
It’s no secret that my taste in programming languages is very weird for a programming language enthusiast professional. Several of my last few posts are about Go, broadly regarded as the programming language equivalent of eating plain oatmeal for breakfast.| mcyoung.xyz
Most people don’t know that Go has special syntax for directives. Unfortunately, it’s not real syntax, it’s just a comment. For example, //go:noinline causes the next function declaration to never get inlined, which is useful for changing the inlining cost of functions that call it.| mcyoung.xyz
You’d need a very specialized electron microscope to get down to the level to actually see a single strand of DNA. – Craig Venter| mcyoung.xyz
I’ve been very fortunate to dodge a nickname throughout my entire career. I’ve never had one. – Jimmie Johnson| mcyoung.xyz
My dad had a guitar but it was acoustic, so I smashed a mirror and glued broken glass to it to make it look more metal. It looked ridiculous! –Max Cavalera| mcyoung
Bad humor is an evasion of reality; good humor is an acceptance of it. –Malcolm Muggeridge| mcyoung
Smart people learn from their mistakes. But the real sharp ones learn from the mistakes of others. –Brandon Mull| mcyoung
As a matter of fact, when compression technology came along, we thought the future in 1996 was about voice. We got it wrong. It is about voice, video, and data, and that is what we have today on these cell phones. –Steve Buyer| mcyoung.xyz
Even though I am a C++ programmer at heart, Go fascinates me for none of the reasons you think. Go has made several interesting design decisions:| mcyoung.xyz
Cross-compiling is taking a computer program and compiling it for a machine that isn’t the one hosting the compilation. Although historically compilers would only compile for the host machine, this is considered an anachronism: all serious native compilers are now cross-compilers.| mcyoung.xyz
I wake up every morning and grab the morning paper. Then I look at the obituary page. If my name is not on it, I get up. –Ben Franklin| mcyoung.xyz
Every modern programming language needs a formatter to make your code look pretty and consistent. Formatters are source-transformation tools that parse source code and re-print the resulting AST in some canonical form that normalizes whitespace and optional syntactic constructs. They remove the tedium of matching indentation and brace placement to match a style guide.| mcyoung.xyz
Lately I’ve been finding myself writing a bit of Go, and I’ve picked up various fun “layout secrets” that help inform how I write code to minimize hidden allocations, and generally be kind to the optimizer. This article is a series of notes on the topic.| mcyoung.xyz
A second post on Go silliness (Miguel, aren’t you a C++ programmer?): in 1.23, Go finally added custom iterators. Now, back when I was at Google and involved in the Go compiler as “the annoying Rust guy who gets lunch with us”, there were proposals suggesting adding something like this, implemented as either an interface or a func:| mcyoung.xyz
JSON is extremely popular but deeply flawed. This article discusses the details of JSON’s design, how it’s used (and misused), and how seemingly helpful “human readability” features cause headaches instead. Crucially, you rarely find JSON-based tools (except dedicated tools like jq) that can safely handle arbitrary JSON documents without a schema—common corner cases can lead to data corruption!| mcyoung.xyz
I will often say that the so-called “C ABI” is a very bad one, and a relatively unimaginative one when it comes to passing complicated types effectively. A lot of people ask me “ok, what would you use instead”, and I just point them to the Go register ABI, but it seems most people have trouble filling in the gaps of what I mean. This article explains what I mean in detail.| mcyoung.xyz
#rust #optimization 2023-11-27 Designing a SIMD Algorithm from Scratch | mcyoung.xyz
#math 2023-09-29 What is a Matrix? A Miserable Pile of Coefficients! | mcyoung.xyz
#rust #language-design 2023-05-11 Single Abstract Method Traits | mcyoung.xyz
I write compilers for fun. I can’t help it. Consequently, I also write a lot of parsers. In systems programming, it’s usually a good idea to try to share memory rather than reuse it, so as such my AST types tend to look like this.| mcyoung.xyz
The other day, I saw this tweet. In it, Andrew Gallant argues that reaching for LLVM IR, instead of assembly, is a useful tool for someone working on performance. Unfortunately, learning material on LLVM is usually aimed at compiler engineers, not generalist working programmers.| mcyoung.xyz
Traits are the core of polymorphism in Rust. Let’s review:| mcyoung.xyz
Let’s say we’re building an allocator. Good allocators need to serve many threads simultaneously, and as such any lock they take is going to be highly contended. One way to work around this, pioneered by TCMalloc, is to have thread-local caches of blocks (hence, the “TC” - thread cached).| mcyoung.xyz
I’m not really one to brag publicly about expensive toys, but a few weeks ago I managed to get one that’s really something special. It is a Curta Type II, a mechanical digital1 calculator manufactured in Liechtenstein between the 50s and 70s, before solid-state calculators killed them and the likes of slide-rules.| mcyoung.xyz
Almost a year ago I developed the moveit Rust library, which provides primitives for expressing something like C++’s T&& and move constructors while retaining Rust’s so-called “destructive move property”: moving a value transfers ownership, rather than doing a funny copy.| mcyoung.xyz
A Turing tarpit is a programming language that is Turing-complete but very painful to accomplish anything in. One particularly notable tarpit is Brainfuck, which has a reputation among beginner and intermediate programmers as being unapproachable and only accessible to the most elite programmers hence the name, as Wikipedia puts it:| mcyoung.xyz
Low level software usually has lots of .cc or .rs files. Even lower-level software, like your cryptography library, probably has .S containing assembly, my least favorite language for code review.| mcyoung.xyz
Writing unsafe in Rust usually involves manual management of memory. Although, ideally, we’d like to exclusively use references for this, sometimes the constraints they apply are too strong. This post is a guide on those constraints and how to weaken them for correctness.| mcyoung.xyz
I’ve been told I need to write this idea down – I figure this one’s a good enough excuse to start one of them programming blogs.| mcyoung.xyz
Alkyne is a scripting language I built a couple of years ago for generating configuration blobs. Its interpreter is a naive AST walker1 that uses ARC2 for memory management, so it’s pretty slow, and I’ve been gradually writing a new evaluation engine for it.| mcyoung.xyz
