Go's Weird Little Iterators

Lately I’ve been finding myself writing a bit of Go, and I’ve picked up various fun “layout secrets” that help inform how I write code to minimize hidden allocations, and generally be kind to the optimizer. This article is a series of notes on the topic. This post is about Go implementation details, so they can probably break you at any time if...

JSON is extremely popular but deeply flawed. This article discusses the details of JSON’s design, how it’s used (and misused), and how seemingly helpful “human readability” features cause headaches instead. Crucially, you rarely find JSON-based tools (except dedicated tools like jq) that can safely handle arbitrary JSON documents without a...

I will often say that the so-called “C ABI” is a very bad one, and a relatively unimaginative one when it comes to passing complicated types effectively. A lot of people ask me “ok, what would you use instead”, and I just point them to the Go register ABI, but it seems most people have trouble filling in the gaps of what I mean. This article...

Another explainer on a fun, esoteric topic: optimizing code with SIMD (single instruction multiple data, also sometimes called vectorization). Designing a good, fast, portable SIMD algorithm is not a simple matter and requires thinking a little bit like a circuit designer. Here’s the mandatory performance benchmark graph to catch your eye. ...

Linear algebra is undoubtedly the most useful field in all of algebra. It finds applications in all kinds of science and engineering, like quantum mechanics, graphics programming, and machine learning. It is the “most well-behaved” algebraic theory, in that other abstract algebra topics often try to approximate linear algebra, when possible. For...