Saturday, July 11, 2026

The Devops Monitoring Problem

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Hey, it's been almost a year since I wrote anything here. Well, I've been busy. Mostly with all kinds of stupid things. But here is ...
Thursday, August 7, 2025

programming by example

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Everyone is excited one way or another about the "vibe programming" with AI. Will it replace the professional programmers? In shor...
Sunday, June 1, 2025

momentum stochastic descent

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Attending the NeurIPS conference last year gave me the idea that I should combine the momentum descent with stochastic descent (people alrea...
Saturday, April 19, 2025

BCPL, B, and C

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Have you ever wondered, what were the earlier BCPL and B languages? As it turns out, Bell Labs still hosts Dennis Ritchie's historic web...
Saturday, February 15, 2025

Asynchronous programming 11 - writing libraries

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Writing the libraries in the asynchronous way is a special challenge. There is so much context attached to the futures, and implicitly inher...

Asynchronous programming 10 - error handling

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What if a computation fails? Then the future still gets completed but has to return an error. At the very least, if the future can return on...
Wednesday, February 12, 2025

Asynchronous programming 9 - composition

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 Consider this traditional function: void writeHeader() {   char buf[512];   // ... populate the bufer ...   write(buf, 512); } and its asyn...
Sunday, February 9, 2025

Asynchronous programming 8 - loops and a semahore

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The two basic varieties of loops are where you either execute everything sequentially or schedule all the iterations in parallel. Suppose a ...
Saturday, February 8, 2025

Asynchronous programming 7 - caching

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Caching of values becomes easy with the futures because the futures take care of almost all the needed synchronization. The combination futu...

Asynchronous programming 6 - inlining done right

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To recap, "inlining" is when we complete a future that has some function chained to it (directly or through other futures), and th...

Asynchronous programming 5 - critical sections the right way

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Here is how to do the critical sections (i.e. sleeplock mutex analog) properly in the asynchronous way. Consider that the chains of futures ...
Wednesday, February 5, 2025

Asynchronous programming 4 - a look under the carpet

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  In this part I want to go over some simplifications I've made in the first part, mostly because some things are wrong and should neve...
Sunday, February 2, 2025

Asynchronous programming 3 - some assistance

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I've been saying it 20 years ago, and 15 years ago in the TPOPP book, and I'm still saying it now: the asynchronous programming has ...
Saturday, January 25, 2025

Asynchronous programming 2 - filling in the types

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For the sake of a quick introduction, I've glanced over some things in part 1. Here I want to come back and show them. Let's start w...
Tuesday, January 21, 2025

Asynchronous programming 1 - Futures and Promises and Executors

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A little while ago I've worked on an OS project that was written in an entirely asynchronous way, without explicit synchronizaton. Which...