Properly Testing Concurrent Data Structures Jul 5, 2024 There’s a fascinating Rust library, loom, which can be used to thoroughly test lock-free data structures. I always wanted to learn how it works. I still do! But recently I accidentally implemented a small toy which, I think, contains some of the loom’s ideas, and it seems worthwhile to write about that. The goal here isn’t to teach you what y

TypeScript is Surprisingly OK for Compilers Aug 17, 2023 There are two main historical trends when choosing an implementation language for something compiler-shaped. For more language-centric tasks, like a formal specification, or a toy hobby language, OCaml makes most sense. See, for example, plzoo or WebAssembly reference interpreter. For something implementation-centric and production ready, C+

Zig And Rust Mar 26, 2023 This post will be a bit all over the place. Several months ago, I wrote Hard Mode Rust, exploring an allocation-conscious style of programming. In the ensuing discussion, @jamii name-dropped TigerBeetle, a reliable, distributed, fast, and small database written in Zig in a similar style, and, well, I now find myself writing Zig full-time, after more than seven years of Ru

<3 Deno Feb 12, 2023 Deno is a relatively new JavaScript runtime. I find quite interesting and aesthetically appealing, in-line with the recent trend to rein in the worse-is-better law of software evolution. This post explains why. The way I see it, the primary goal of Deno is to simplify development of software, relative to the status quo. Simplifying means removing the accidental complexity. To

Rust’s Ugly Syntax Jan 26, 2023 People complain about Rust syntax. I think that most of the time when people think they have an issue with Rust’s syntax, they actually object to Rust’s semantics. In this slightly whimsical post, I’ll try to disentangle the two. Let’s start with an example of an ugly Rust syntax: pub fn read<P: AsRef<Path>>(path: P) -> io::Result<Vec<u8>> { fn inner(path: &Path) ->

Why LSP? Apr 25, 2022 LSP (language server protocol) is fairly popular today. There’s a standard explanation of why that is the case. You probably have seen this picture before: I believe that this standard explanation of LSP popularity is wrong. In this post, I suggest an alternative picture. Standard Explanation The explanation goes like this: There are M editors and N languages. If you want to

ARCHITECTURE.md Feb 6, 2021 If you maintain an open-source project in the range of 10k-200k lines of code, I strongly encourage you to add an ARCHITECTURE document next to README and CONTRIBUTING. Before going into the details of why and how, I want to emphasize that this is not another “docs are good, write more docs” advice. I am pretty sloppy about documentation, and, e.g., I often use just “si