rockwotj

Technology does not determine the success of a company. I’ve seen amazing tech fail, and things strapped together with ducktape and bubblegum be a wild success.

https://rockwotj.com/blog/async-wasm-in-seastar/ - been meaning to write about this for a long time. Thanks for the nudge :)

I have done this integrating wasmtime into a a C++ seastar.io application. I’ll have to write a post about it

Claude is king for agentic workflows right now because it’s amazing at tool calling and following instructions well (among other things)

I thought everyone was just using open telemetry traces for this? This is just a classic observability problem that isn’t unique with agents. More important yes, but not unique functionally.

networking costs are so high in AWS I doubt this makes sense

It’s so hard to actually benchmark languages because it so much depends on the dataset, I am pretty sure with simdjson and some tricks I could write C++ (or Rust) that could top the leaderboard (see some of the techniques from the billion row challenge!).

tbh for silly benchmarks like this it will ultimately be hard to beat a language that compiles to machine code, due to jit warmup etc.

It’s hard to due benchmarks right, for example are you testing IO performance? are OS caches flushed between language runs? What kind of disk is used etc? Performance does not exist in a vacuum of just the language or algorithm.

With the new GC I really love the trend of understanding memory bandwidth is the bottleneck for many things and the combination of locality and SIMD is a big performance unlock.

Reminds me of the WAND vs MAXSCORE discussion by turbopuffer: https://turbopuffer.com/blog/fts-v2-maxscore

you also get a very slimmed down interface that is usually way faster to load. one of the reasons I love HN is that it is super snappy to load and isn’t riddled with dependencies that take forever to load and display. Snappy UIs are always a breath of fresh air.

Isn’t codex open source and you can just go read what they do?

I have read the gemini source and it’s a pretty simple prompt to summarize everything when the context window is full

Thankfully all these LLM labs are heavily invested in python so this seems like the likely route IMO

this isn’t the right way to look at it. It’s really server side rendering where the LLM is doing the markup language generation instead of a template. The custom UI is usually higher level. Airbnb has been doing this for years: https://medium.com/airbnb-engineering/a-deep-dive-into-airbn...

Redpanda is https://jepsen.io/analyses/redpanda-21.10.1

Checkout redpanda

Porting LevelDB[1] to Seastar[2], for internal metadata storage in Redpanda[3]. Before you ask why can’t something off the shelf be used, seastar has unique constraints around its runtime and its memory allocator that means we can’t reuse an existing library.

1: https://github.com/google/leveldb

2: https://github.com/scylladb/seastar

3: https://github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda/pull/28351

yes thanks

> Direct I/O means no more fsync: no more complexity via background flushes and optimal scheduling of syncs. There's no kernel overhead from copying and coalescing. It essentially provides the performance, control, and simplicity of issuing raw 1:1 I/O requests.

Not true, you still need fsync in direct I/O to ensure durability in power loss situations. Some drives have write caches that means acknowledged writes live in non-volatile memory. So maybe the perf is wildly better because you’re sacrificing durability?

I would love to use gdb through an agent instead of directly. I spend so much time looking up commands and I sometimes skip things because I get impatient stepping over the next thing

Also move_pages is about numa nodes not spilling to swap

That seems to be contradictory, as they talk about using it to spill to disk in a simpler way. You can’t swap with mlock?

For bazel:

https://github.com/aherrmann/rules_zig

Real world projects like ZML uses it:

https://github.com/zml/zml

Yeah I mean if you have a latency sensitive workload, you don’t want page faults and swapping to give hidden latency spikes - it kills your P99 latencies

Yeah I built a custom sysroot for Redpanda (Bazel/C++/Distributed Kafka) using a really simple docker image: https://github.com/redpanda-data/redpanda/blob/dev/bazel/too...

We also have an dockerfile for clang/LLVM in that repo so the whole thing is hermetic. It’s a bit of shame Bazel doesn’t come with stronger options/defaults here, because I feel like I want to reproduce this same toolchain on every C++ project with Bazel

> outputs 3 chars

You mean codepoints or maybe grapheme clusters?

Anyways yeah it’s a little more complicated but the principle of being able to truncate a string without splitting a codepoint in O(1) is still useful

A friend is starting a company to do evals by just pitting models agent each other in simulations. Their teaser video is good (and humorous!)

https://kradle.ai/

Shortwave has had all this and more for over a year and still nothing in Gmail.

Yes please don’t add another component to introduce idempotency, it will likely have weird abstraction leaking behavior or just be plain broken if you don’t understand delivery guarantees. Much better to support some kind of label or metadata with writes so a user can track progress on their end and store it alongside their existing data.

Came here to say these same things exactly. Best write up I know on this subject: https://use-the-index-luke.com/sql/partial-results/fetch-nex...

Maybe needs a neutral party comparison :)

The delivery guarantees section alone doesn’t make me trust it. You can do at least once or at most once with kafka. Exactly once is mostly a lie, it depends on the downstream system: unless going back to the same system, the best you can do is at least once with idempotancy

Fun fact: this is how github adds syntax highlighting in its search bar. A while back I built the same syntax highlighting in Shortwave (an email client) using the same “view on top of a transparent input” trick. Pair it all with the following blog, for a top notch search UX

https://blog.superhuman.com/delightful-search-more-than-meet...