You can check out a YouTube recording of a talk based on this blog post. I started programming in Rust several years ago, and it has gradually changed the way I design programs in other programming languages, most notably in Python. Before I started using Rust, I was usually writing Python code in a very dynamic and type-loose way, without type hints, passing and returning dictionaries everywhere,
Don't write clean code, write CRISP code — Bitfield Consulting
I’m sure we’re all in favour of “clean code”, but it’s one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie things that no one can reasonably disagree with. Who wants to write dirty code, unless maybe it’s for a porn site? The problem, of course, is that few of us can agree on what “clean code” means, and how to get there. A rule like “methods should only do one thing”, looks great on a T-shirt, but it’s not so
TL;DR; We are changing std::sort in LLVM’s libcxx. That’s a long story of what it took us to get there and all possible consequences, bugs you might encounter with examples from open source. We provide some benchmarks, perspective, why we did this in the first place and what it cost us with exciting ideas from Hyrum’s Law to reinforcement learning. All changes went into open source and thus I can
AST vs. Bytecode: Interpreters in the Age of Meta-Compilation
233 AST vs. Bytecode: Interpreters in the Age of Meta-Compilation OCTAVE LAROSE, University of Kent, UK SOPHIE KALEBA, University of Kent, UK HUMPHREY BURCHELL, University of Kent, UK STEFAN MARR, University of Kent, UK Thanks to partial evaluation and meta-tracing, it became practical to build language implementations that reach state-of-the-art peak performance by implementing only an interprete
Parsing SQL - Strumenta
The code for this tutorial is on GitHub: parsing-sql SQL is a language to handle data in a relational database. If you worked with data you have probably worked with SQL. In this article we will talk about parsing SQL. It is in the same league of HTML: maybe you never learned it formally but you kind of know how to use it. That is great because if you know SQL, you know how to handle data. However
How I developed a faster Ruby interpreter | Red Hat Developer
In this article, I will describe my efforts to implement a faster interpreter for CRuby, the Ruby language interpreter, using a dynamically specialized internal representation (IR). I believe this article will interest developers trying to improve the interpreter performance of dynamic programming languages (e.g., CPython developers). I will cover the following topics: Existing CRuby interpreter a
Most of my readers are probably familiar with procedural programming, object-oriented programming (OOP), and functional programming (FP). The majority of top programming languages on all of the language popularity charts (like TIOBE) support all three to some extent. Even if a programmer avoided one or more of those three paradigms like the plague, they’re likely at least aware of them and what th
I thought it would be fun to go outside of my comfort zone of web development topics and write about something completely different and new, something I have never written about before. So today, I'm going to show you how to implement a programming language! The project will parse and execute programs written in a simple language I called my (I know it's a lame name, but hey, it is "my" language).
Python's "Type Hints" are a bit of a disappointment to me
blog - git - desktop - images - contact Python's "Type Hints" are a bit of a disappointment to me 2022-04-21 Preface You are reading version 2.0 of this blog post. I've incorporated some feedback I got into this revised version. Introduction Over the course of several Python 3.x versions, "type hints" were introduced. You can now annotate functions: def greeting(name: str) -> str: return 'Hello '
Over the course of my Spring 2020 semester at Harvey Mudd College, I developed a self-hosting compiler entirely from scratch. This article walks through many interesting parts of the project. It’s laid out so you can just read from beginning to end, but if you’re more interested in a particular topic, feel free to jump there. Or, take a look at the project on GitHub. Table of contents What the pro
A Walk with LuaJIT
The following is a chronicle of implementing a general purpose zero-instrumentation BPF based profiler for LuaJIT. Some assumptions are made about what this entails and it may be helpful to read some of our other work in this area. One major change from prior efforts is that instead of working with the original Parca unwinder we are now working with the OpenTelemetry eBPF profiler. If you missed t
January 13, 2023 Hello! I’ve been thinking about writing a zine about how things are represented on computers in bytes, so I was thinking about floating point. I’ve heard a million times about the dangers of floating point arithmetic, like: addition isn’t associative (x + (y + z) is different from (x + y) + z) if you add very big values to very small values, you can get inaccurate results (the sma
Tier 4 Support § Support for these targets is entirely experimental. If this target is provided by LLVM, LLVM may have the target as an experimental target, which means that you need to use Zig-provided binaries for the target to be available, or build LLVM from source with special configure flags. zig targets will display the target if it is available. This target may be considered deprecated by
Speed of Rust vs C
The run-time speed and memory usage of programs written in Rust should about the same as of programs written in C, but overall programming style of these languages is different enough that it's hard to generalize their speed. This is a summary of where they're the same, where C is faster, and where Rust is faster. Disclaimer: It's not meant to be an objective benchmark uncovering indisputable trut
The Go Programming Language and Environment – Communications of the ACM
Go is a programming language created at Google in late 2007 and released as open source in November 2009. Since then, it has operated as a public project, with contributions from thousands of individuals and dozens of companies. Go has become a popular language for building cloud infrastructure: Docker, a Linux container manager, and Kubernetes, a container deployment system, are core cloud techno
My thoughts on writing a Minecraft server from scratch (in Bash) For the past year or so, I've been thinking about writing a Minecraft server in Bash as a thought excercise. I once tried that before with the Classic protocol (the one from 2009), but I quickly realized there wasn't really a way to properly parse binary data in bash. Take the following code sample: function a() { read -n 2 uwu echo
Solving Quantitative Reasoning Problems With Language Models
Solving Quantitative Reasoning Problems with Language Models Aitor Lewkowycz∗, Anders Andreassen†, David Dohan†, Ethan Dyer†, Henryk Michalewski†, Vinay Ramasesh†, Ambrose Slone, Cem Anil, Imanol Schlag, Theo Gutman-Solo, Yuhuai Wu, Behnam Neyshabur∗, Guy Gur-Ari∗, and Vedant Misra∗ Google Research Abstract Language models have achieved remarkable performance on a wide range of tasks that require
PowerShell: the object-oriented shell you didn’t know you needed
PowerShell is an interactive shell and scripting language from Microsoft. It’s object-oriented — and that’s not just a buzzword, that’s a big difference to how the standard Unix shells work. And it is actually usable as an interactive shell. Getting Started PowerShell is so nice, Microsoft made it twice. Specifically, there concurrently exist two products named PowerShell: Windows PowerShell (5.1)
Tier 4 Support § Support for these targets is entirely experimental. If this target is provided by LLVM, LLVM may have the target as an experimental target, which means that you need to use Zig-provided binaries for the target to be available, or build LLVM from source with special configure flags. zig targets will display the target if it is available. This target may be considered deprecated by
Accelerate Python code 100x by import taichi as ti | Taichi Docs
Python has become the most popular language in many rapidly evolving sectors, such as deep learning and data sciences. Yet its easy readability comes at the cost of performance. Of course, we all complain about program performance from time to time, and Python should certainly not take all the blame. Still, it's fair to say that Python's nature as an interpreted language does not help, especially
Python behind the scenes #13: the GIL and its effects on Python multithreading
As you probably know, the GIL stands for the Global Interpreter Lock, and its job is to make the CPython interpreter thread-safe. The GIL allows only one OS thread to execute Python bytecode at any given time, and the consequence of this is that it's not possible to speed up CPU-intensive Python code by distributing the work among multiple threads. This is, however, not the only negative effect of
Fantastic Learning Resources Aug 6, 2023 People sometimes ask me: “Alex, how do I learn X?”. This article is a compilation of advice I usually give. This is “things that worked for me” rather than “the most awesome things on earth”. I do consider every item on the list to be fantastic though, and I am forever grateful to people putting these resources together. Learning to Code I don’t think I hav
Manuel Cerón
Last year I finally decided to learn some Rust. The official book by Steve Klabnik and Carol Nichols is excellent, but even after reading it and working on some small code exercises, I felt that I needed more to really understand the language. I wanted to work on a small project to get some hands-on experience, but most of my ideas didn’t feel very well suited for Rust. Then I started reading the
The History Before dataclasses were added to Python in version 3.7 — in June of 2018 — the __init__ special method had an important use. If you had a class representing a data structure — for example a 2DCoordinate, with x and y attributes — you would want to be able to construct it as 2DCoordinate(x=1, y=2), which would require you to add an __init__ method with x and y parameters. The other opti
This article is a translation, the original version is available here. I started using the OCaml language regularly around 2012, and since then, my interest and enthusiasm for this language have only grown. It has become my preferred choice for almost all my personal projects, and it has also influenced my professional choices. Since 2014, I have been actively participating in public conferences d
Try Mastering Emacs for free! Are you struggling with the basics? Have you mastered movement and editing yet? When you have read Mastering Emacs you will understand Emacs. It’s that time again: there’s a new major version of Emacs and, with it, a treasure trove of new features and changes. Notable features include the formal inclusion of native compilation, a technique that will greatly speed up y
Type Parameters Proposal
Ian Lance Taylor Robert Griesemer August 20, 2021 StatusThis is the design for adding generic programming using type parameters to the Go language. This design has been proposed and accepted as a future language change. We currently expect that this change will be available in the Go 1.18 release in early 2022. AbstractWe suggest extending the Go language to add optional type parameters to type an
Reflection is something a lot of people wish the Rust language had: It is not hard to stumble across somebody with an interesting use case for it. People want to use it for serialization, GCs, better interop, and so, so much more. If you can think of a task, there is somebody out there wishing they could implement it using reflection. Sadly, it does not look like it is coming any time soon. Still,
Faster virtual machines: Speeding up programming language execution - Mort's Ramblings
Date: 2023-01-15 Git: https://gitlab.com/mort96/blog/blob/published/content/00000-home/00015-fast-interpreters.md In this post, I hope to explore how interpreters are often implemented, what a "virtual machine" means in this context, and how to make them faster. Note: This post will contain a lot of C source code. Most of it is fairly simple C which should be easy to follow, but some familiarity w
For almost a complete decade—starting with discovering Haskell in about 2009 and right up until switching to a job where I used primarily Ruby and C++ in about 2019—I would have called myself first and foremost a Haskell programmer. Not necessarily a dogmatic Haskeller! I was—and still am—proudly a polyglot who bounces between languages depending on the needs of the project. However, Haskell was m
Introduction: Density Is King (With a Tiny VM) I've previously come to the conclusion that there's little reason for using bytecode in the modern world, except in order to get more compact code, for which it can be very effective. So, what kind of a bytecode engine will give you more compact code? Suppose I want a bytecode interpreter for a very small programming environment, specifically to minim
In this write-up, I will walk you through an implementation of a string formatting library for C++ I came up with for my video game. The end result came out really compact, at only 65 lines of code—providing a skeleton that can be supplemented with additional functionality at low cost. Usage Given a format buffer… char buffer[64]; String_Buffer buf = {str, sizeof str}; …the fmt::format function pr
A professional programmer delivers value through the authoring and maintaining of software that solves problems. (There are other important ways for professional programmers to deliver value but this post is about programming.) Programmers rely on various tools to author software. Arguably the most important and consequential choice of tool is the programming language. In this post, I will articul
The Alkyne GC · mcyoung
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. This post isn’t about Alkyne itself, that’s for another day. For now, I’d like to write down some notes for the GC I wrote3 for it, and more
The simplicity of Prolog
Back to homepage Nowadays the most popular programming languages are Python, Javascript, Java, C++, C#, Kotlin and Ruby, and the average programmer is probably familiar with one or more of these languages. It's relatively easy to switch from one to another (barring any framework specific knowledge that may be needed), since they are all imperative (and for the most part object-oriented) languages,
I recently stumbled upon this screenshot while researching social media on the train. Of course, it was followed by a cascade of spiteful comments, criticizing this fresh programmer’s attempt to solve a classical problem in computer science. The modulus operation. Now, in a world where AI is replacing programmers by the minute, taking their jobs and revolutionizing the way we think about code, may
This post is based on my RustNationUK ‘24 talk with the same title. The talk video is on youtube, the slides are served from here. Also, here’s the lyrics of the song I introduced the talk with (sung to the tune of Bob Dylan’s “The times, they are a-changin’”): Come gather Rustaceans wherever you roam and admit that our numbers have steadily grown. The community’s awesomeness ain’t set in stone, s
I had this conversation over and over before I really understood it. It goes: “X language can be as fast as a compiled language because it has a JIT compiler!” It gets hand-wavy at the end, doesn’t it? I find that frustrating. These days I work on YJIT, a JIT for Ruby. So I can make this extremely NOT hand-wavy. Let’s talk specifics. I like specifics. Wait, What’s JIT Again? An interpreter reads a
The sad state of property-based testing libraries Posted on Jul 2, 2024 Property-based testing is a rare example of academic research that has made it to the mainstream in less than 30 years. Under the slogan “don’t write tests, generate them” property-based testing has gained support from a diverse group of programming language communities. In fact, the Wikipedia page of the original property-bas
Python behind the scenes #6: how Python object system works
As we know from the previous parts of this series, the execution of a Python program consists of two major steps: The CPython compiler translates Python code to bytecode. The CPython VM executes the bytecode. We've been focusing on the second step for quite a while. In part 4 we've looked at the evaluation loop, a place where Python bytecode gets executed. And in part 5 we've studied how the VM ex
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Writing Python like it’s Rust
Changing std::sort at Google’s Scale and Beyond
Implementing Logic Programming
Building a Toy Programming Language in Python
Kalyn: a self-hosting compiler for x86-64
Examples of floating point problems
0.8.0 Release Notes ⚡ The Zig Programming Language
My thoughts on writing a Minecraft server from scratch (in Bash)
0.10.0 Release Notes ⚡ The Zig Programming Language
Fantastic Learning Resources
Deciphering Glyph :: Stop Writing `__init__` Methods
xvw.lol - Why I chose OCaml as my primary language
What's New in Emacs 28.1?
Rust, reflection and access rules
Leaving Haskell behind
bytecode interpreters for tiny computers ⁑ Dercuano
A string formatting library in 65 lines of C++
Gregory Szorc's Digital Home | Rust is for Professionals
4 billion if statements
Easy Mode Rust — Llogiq on stuff
When is JIT Faster Than A Compiler? - Shopify
The sad state of property-based testing libraries