Taking learning seriously

In some of the communities I hang around in1, there’s a fondness for the kind of industrial research that happened at places like PARC and Bell Labs. Things like Smalltalk, Mesa/Cedar, and Plan 9 not only introduced new ideas but demonstrated them in practical, working systems. If you want to actually do research like this, how should you go...

During my CS undergrad at Carleton University, I had the opportunity to do a bunch of internships.1 Looking back, I can’t help but think how lucky I was! I got to work on some great teams, learned a ton, and had a lot of fun. Corel My first real internship was on the Linux team at Corel in the summer of 2000. I was super excited about this, for a...

For the last 13 years, I’ve done the same thing almost every Monday night. At 9pm, I head out to a small sports club on the outskirts of Munich to play 5-a-side soccer. Many players have left, and new people have joined, but there’s a core group of us who’ve stayed the same. When you’ve been doing the same thing, with the same guys, for more than...

In response to a question on Twitter1, Richard Hipp wrote about why SQLite uses a bytecode VM for executing SQL statements. Most people probably associate bytecode VMs with general-purpose programming languages, like JavaScript or Python. But sometimes they appear in surprising places! Here are a few that I know about. eBPF Did you know that...

Late last year, I read a few blog posts that said something like “everyone knows that bytecode interpreters are faster than tree-walking interpreters”. And then I saw the paper AST vs. Bytecode: Interpreters in the Age of Meta-Compilation” when Stefan Marr shared a draft on Twitter. I realized that although I’d written a number of tree-walking...