The social consequences of type systems

I’m often asked why the Rust test runner I maintain, cargo-nextest, runs every test in a separate process. Here’s my best attempt at explaining the rationale behind it. This document is cross-posted from the canonical copy at the nextest site. Benchmarks are available there as well, though a large part of this document talks about...

RustConf 2024 is next week, so I thought I’d put up a written version of my RustConf 2023 talk about signals in time for that. I’ve tried to retain the feel of it being a talk, while editing it heavily to make it readable as a blog entry. Some links: Video of the talk on YouTube. Slides on Google Slides. Demo repository on GitHub. 1....

At Oxide, we use Helios as the base OS for the cloud computers we sell. Helios is a distribution of illumos, a Unix-based operating system descended from Solaris. As someone who learned illumos on the job, I’ve been really impressed by the powerful debugging tools it provides. I had a chance to use some of them recently to track down a...

As of this writing, it appears that another open-source project lead has rejected a proposal to replace gendered he language with they, citing vague concerns about “politics.” (Please refrain from contacting the project about this; it’s counterproductive.) At Oxide, one of our core values is empathy: the ability to understand others’...

Introduction One of the coolest features of AMD’s Ryzen desktop CPUs, and historically a great reason to get them over the competition, was the official support for error-corrected memory (ECC RAM)1. With most Ryzen 1000 through 5000 series CPUs and the right motherboards, ordinary users could get ECC RAM going without having to spring for more...