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skavion Making a GTK application in Haskell, part 1

I will continue using GTK until QT decides to stop being ugly (by default).

skavion TurboPython – A Python-to-C++ Compiler

If you want an AoT compiled almost-Python, why not use Mojo?

skavion F.02 Decommission

i think you mean a word that’s not craven

skavion Gemini 4 Argon

Do you know what wasn’t successful?

skavion Gemini 4 Argon

Fuchsia is the only OS that uses that kernel.

Also, that was an easily citable doc line, but I think a more comprehensive look at the work done in Fuchsia shows it has or had ambitions to run on personal computers.

e.g.: fancy graphics stack, Linux compatibility layer, ideas about OS integrated cloud syncing, the original work on the Xi text editor.

skavion Gemini 4 Argon

I’m more interested in whether it’s still a thing people want to work on rather than something people are forced to maintain.

skavion Gemini 4 Argon

It wasn’t actually. From the docs for Zircon (Fuchsia’s kernel) [0]:

> Zircon targets modern phones and modern personal computers with fast processors, non-trivial amounts of ram with arbitrary peripherals doing open ended computation.

Fuchsia also had a Linux compatibility layer similar to WSL1 at some point. Might still be there?

[0]: https://fuchsia.dev/fuchsia-src/concepts/kernel/zx_and_lk

skavion Gemini 4 Argon

Interesting to see a mention of Fuchsia on a big Google announcement. Is the project still truly alive? Are the ambitions still as grand? Is the team as stacked as it used to be?

Also, a link to the rust root of Zircon in case anyone else was interested: https://fuchsia.googlesource.com/fuchsia/+/refs/heads/main/z...

skavion Updated Google Maps shows destruction of the city of Rafah

if you mean that all war is unjustified, consider stating that plainly. if that's not what you mean, then perhaps there is some nuance left out of your statement.

skavion Fearless SIMD v1.0

Would anyone be able to compare this library's design to https://github.com/google/highway?

skavion Samsung is expected to more than double output of its HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM

direct link: https://www.servethehome.com/micron-evolving-memory-architec...

skavion Jemalloc 5.4.0

> Are you sure you don't just have an axe to grind? Because that is an exceedingly uncommon edge case. Typically you only have a few threads and you aren't inundating the allocator with requests thus it is unlikely to make any practical difference.

Totally fair, and I agree that you should only have a few threads (or TPC) and shouldn’t be inundating the allocator with requests. But I’m only grinding this axe because I’ve personally had to deal with a system that went against most of that guidance.

We ran far too many threads in a memory-constrained environment. Thread count was many multiples of core count.

I totally agree that this is “questionable territory”, but honestly, any application that’s outgrown the basic glibc malloc has made a few mistakes.

skavion Two parallel neural ectoderm progenitors contribute to the developing brain

very naive question: does organ even have a strict enough definition for discussions like this to be worthwhile?

skavion Jemalloc 5.4.0

> seems likely to be a wash at absolute best

maybe i give it too much weight, but:

> massive oversubscription of physical CPU cores (ie tens of thousands of threads) where TLS becomes utterly wasteful while also thrashing the cache

seems worth solving to me

skavion Comparison of Malloc() Algorithms

yeah that’s a common mistake when evaluating tcmalloc. gperftools tcmalloc diverged quite a while ago. doesn’t have a lot of the fancier features of modern tcmalloc [0].

[0]: https://github.com/google/tcmalloc/blob/master/docs/gperftoo...

skavion Jemalloc 5.4.0

my feeling is that the space efficiency gains are probably more significant than the reduction in core migration costs. many applications have far more threads than the system has cores.

skavion Jemalloc 5.4.0

https://docs.kernel.org/userspace-api/rseq.html

cost for interruption in an rseq critical section is that the PC gets overwritten to the rseq abort entry point before the task is rescheduled. no management thread necessary.

should be fairly minimal cost, especially assuming interruptions in the critical section are rare.

skavion Jemalloc 5.4.0

https://google.github.io/tcmalloc/rseq.html

i don’t believe rseq based cpu local caches require memory barriers on the fast path.

skavion Comparison of Malloc() Algorithms

no article, sorry, grabbed the numbers from an old PR.

to confirm, you were using tcmalloc from https://github.com/google/tcmalloc and not from https://github.com/gperftools/gperftools, right?

the latter is a lot worse iiuc.

skavion Jemalloc 5.4.0

i think we agree that per cpu caching seems superior. i’m looking for the other side of this. most allocators seem to have stuck with per thread.

skavion Jemalloc 5.4.0

does anyone familiar with the art have thoughts on why only tcmalloc switched from thread caches to cpu caches? would it make linux behavior diverge too much from other platforms?

skavion Goose Programming Language

https://github.com/aardappel/goose/blob/master/docs/tutorial...

this bit seems a bit messy.

skavion Comparison of Malloc() Algorithms

a while back, our tests with a proprietary app led us to tcmalloc (new).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47403847

skavion Comparison of Malloc() Algorithms

we actually ended up with (new) tcmalloc.

for us, tc was among the fastest in runtime while being very space efficient [0]. large rust application using far too many threads.

we’ve since also had great success with tc’s built in profiling tools.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47403847

skavion Introducing GNOME 51, "A Coruña"

so happy GNOME exists. I hear great things about KDE internals, but Plasma and KDE apps are so ugly.

modern GNOME is honestly a more consistently clean interface than even (modern) macOS.

skavion Comparison of Malloc() Algorithms

yup and the characterization of each allocator is so fuzzy, with zero methodology provided.

allocators are so simple to just swap into your program. if you can put together a few representative workloads, you should just try out a few allocators and profile whatever metrics you care about.

skavion One Year of Sponsored Servo Development

that's something you, the user, are free to enforce with priorities, pinning, etc.

skavion Houthis used Anthropic to develop guided weapons

Houthis use engineering and education to develop guided weapons

skavion Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft

All reasonable pain points. On the "Cargo fuckery" though, you might consider switching to an alternate build system like Bazel. Comes with its own set of issues (rustc isn't tied to Cargo, but the third party ecosystem definitely assumes it). But for embedded where you're cross compiling and working with C and C++ as well, I find it's a better solution than Cargo.

skavion iPhone Duo

That design was explored years ago with earlier foldables. The market consolidated on the two screen design pretty early.

not entirely sure why, but i’d guess there were durability concerns with the screen wrapping around the edge. might have also felt weird to hold. potentially the crease would be worse in unfolded mode as well.