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How Ruby executes JIT code

Ever since YJIT’s introduction, I’ve felt simultaneously close to and distant from Ruby’s JIT compiler. I know how to enable it in my Ruby programs. I know it makes my Ruby programs run faster by compiling some of them into machine code. But my understanding around YJIT, or JIT compilers in Ruby in general, seems to end here. A few months ago, my colleague Max Bernstein wrote ZJIT has been merged into Ruby to explain how ZJIT compiles Ruby’s bytecode to HIR, LIR, and then to native code. It she

Byte Type: Supporting Raw Data Copies in the LLVM IR

GSoC 2025 - Byte Type: Supporting Raw Data Copies in the LLVM IR By Pedro Lobo #GSoC , #clang , #optimizations , #IR 22 minute read This summer I participated in GSoC under the LLVM Compiler Infrastructure. The goal of the project was to add a new byte type to the LLVM IR, capable of representing raw memory values. This new addition enables the native implementation of memory-related intrinsics in the IR, including memcpy , memmove and memcmp , fixes existing unsound transformations and en

Topics: byte i8 load ptr type

A Fast Bytecode VM for Arithmetic: The Compiler

In this post, we write the compiler for our AST to bytecode, and a decompiler for the bytecode. In this series of posts, we write a fast bytecode compiler and a virtual machine for arithmetic in Haskell. We explore the following topics: In this series of posts, we write a fast bytecode compiler and a virtual machine for arithmetic in Haskell. We explore the following topics: Parsing arithmetic expressions to Abstract Syntax Trees (ASTs). Unit testing for our parser. Interpreting ASTs. Comp

Learning about GPUs through measuring memory bandwidth

Learning About GPUs Through Measuring Memory Bandwidth At Traverse Research, we need to have a deep understanding of GPU performance to develop our benchmark, Evolve. Additionally, we sometimes do projects for very specific hardware where we need to know all the ins and outs of this hardware. One way we do this is by using microbenchmarks to measure specific parts of the GPU to get new insights. In this article, we will share what we learned from measuring the memory bandwidth of various GPUs.

Out-Fibbing CPython with the Plush Interpreter

Out-Fibbing CPython with the Plush Interpreter In the last post I talked about Plush, the toy programming language with actor-based parallelism I've been tinkering with. The implementation is still immature, but it's reached a point where I can write fun programs that produce 2D/3D graphics and parallelize things over multiple CPU cores. Something I'd like to try soon, for the fun of it, is to animate a spinning cube with software rendering (rasterization). Before I get to that though, I'd like

We'd be better off with 9-bit bytes

We'd be Better Off with 9-bit Bytes A number of 70s computing systems had nine-bit bytes, most prominently the PDP-10, but today [1 Apparently, it was the System/360 that really set the standard here.] all systems use 8-bit bytes and that now seems natural. [2 Though you still see RFCs use "octet", and the C standard has a CHAR_BITS macro, to handle the possibility of a different-sized byte.] As a power of two, eight is definitely nicer. But I think a series of historical coincidences would act

Topics: 18 bit byte maybe numbers

How we made JSON.stringify more than twice as fast

JSON.stringify is a core JavaScript function for serializing data. Its performance directly affects common operations across the web, from serializing data for a network request to saving data to localStorage . A faster JSON.stringify translates to quicker page interactions and more responsive applications. That’s why we’re excited to share that a recent engineering effort has made JSON.stringify in V8 more than twice as fast. This post breaks down the technical optimizations that made this impr

A deep dive into Rust and C memory interoperability

“Memory oppresses me.” - Severian, The Book of the New Sun Interviewer: “What happens if you allocate memory with C’s malloc and try to free it with Rust’s dealloc, if you get a pointer to the memory from C?” Me: “If we do it via FFI then there’s a possibility the program may continue working (because the underlying structs share the same memory layout? right? …right?)” Now if you have any experience working with memory management, you know that this is a dangerous answer. But I didn’t know it a

Topics: 00 bytes free memory size

Part 1: A Deep Dive into Rust and C Memory Interoperability

“Memory oppresses me.” - Severian, The Book of the New Sun Interviewer: “What happens if you allocate memory with C’s malloc and try to free it with Rust’s dealloc, if you get a pointer to the memory from C?” Me: “If we do it via FFI then there’s a possibility the program may continue working (because the underlying structs share the same memory layout? right? …right?)” Now if you have any experience working with memory management, you know that this is a dangerous answer. But I didn’t know it a

Topics: 00 bytes free memory size

Writing memory efficient C structs

29 July 2025 Writing memory efficient C structs by Tom Scheers A struct in C is the best way to organize your data so that you can easily use the data later in your program. However, there are a few caveats to C structures, mainly how their memory works. Our struct struct Monster { bool is_alive ; // Used to see whether or not the monster is alive int health ; // Health of the monster int damage_hit ; // Damage they deal per hit char name [ 64 ]; // Name of the monster with a max of 63 char

What's the Difference Between Megabits and Megabytes? Here's What You Need to Know

Knowing how your home internet works may rely on understanding these two key terms: Megabits and Megabytes. Internet terminology is often maddeningly confusing. Case in point: Megabits and megabytes. Both refer to units of digital information, but the difference is subtle enough to cause plenty of confusion. Knowing the difference between the two terminologies can make all the difference when picking out an internet plan or figuring out how quickly you can download a file. Don’t worry -- we’ll c

SIMD within a register: How I doubled hash table lookup performance

While working on a Cuckoo Filter implementation in C#, I created an array-like structure for the underlying hash table. I chose an 8-bit fingerprint: it aligns nicely on a byte boundary and still keeps the false-positive rate around 3 %. The layout looked straightforward—just a byte array where the start of each bucket is calculated as bucketIdx * bucketSize . The size of each bucket is 4 slots, which is a solid choice for Cuckoo Filter. Bucket 0 3A 00 B7 F2 Bucket 1 4C 91 00 DE Bucket n AA 00

SIMD Within a Register: How I Doubled Hash Table Lookup Performance

While working on a Cuckoo Filter implementation in C#, I created an array-like structure for the underlying hash table. I chose an 8-bit fingerprint: it aligns nicely on a byte boundary and still keeps the false-positive rate around 3 %. The layout looked straightforward—just a byte array where the start of each bucket is calculated as bucketIdx * bucketSize . The size of each bucket is 4 slots, which is a solid choice for Cuckoo Filter. Bucket 0 3A 00 B7 F2 Bucket 1 4C 91 00 DE Bucket n AA 00

Breaking the WASM/JS communication performance barrier

In sledgehammer every operation is encoded as a sequence of bytes packed into an array. Every operation takes 1 byte plus whatever data is required for it. Each operation is encoded in a batch of four as a u32. Getting a number from an array buffer has a high constant cost, but getting a u32 instead of a u8 is not more expensive. Sledgehammer bindgen reads the u32 and then splits it into the 4 individual bytes. It will shuffle and pack the bytes into as few buckets as possible and try to inline

Trump, who promised to save TikTok, threatens to shut down TikTok

Donald Trump vowed to save TikTok before taking office, claiming only he could make a deal to keep the app operational in the US despite national security concerns. But then, he put Vice President JD Vance in charge of the deal, and after months of negotiations, the US still doesn't seem to have found terms for a sale that the Chinese government is willing to approve. Now, Trump Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick has confirmed that if China won't approve the latest version of the deal—which coul

I wasted weeks hand optimizing assembly because I benchmarked on random data

Once upon a time I worked in the field of Java Optimizations. The target system was a distributed data processing platform that ran across hundreds of thousands of machines. At such scales, a 0.5% improvement would easily make up my salary going forward, and 2% was a good result for the half. That doesn’t mean it was easy. Never have I ever seen such a highly optimized Java codebase. Not before, not since. Every low hanging fruit had long since been picked clean. For example, there was minima

GIGABYTE's new AI PCs are slim, multitasking powerhouses for professionals

GIGABYTE ZDNET BrandX for GIGABYTE For the modern on-the-go professional, there are two non-negotiables when it comes to laptops: It has to be light, and it has to be powerful. Until recently, these two demands were in conflict. The lighter a laptop was, the less likely that it could make it through a long remote workday or a transatlantic flight without its battery dying or the entire system overheating. GIGABYTE's new AI laptops are powerhouse machines designed for gamers and creators, but

TikTok parent ByteDance reportedly developing its own XR glasses

Edgar Cervantes / Android Authority TL;DR ByteDance is reportedly working on mixed reality goggles. Sources compare the size and shape of the goggles to Bigscreen’s Beyond headset. It will come tethered to a puck, similar to Meta’s XR glasses. Outside of AI, the hottest thing in tech these days seems to be smart glasses. We’ve known for a few months now that Meta is working on XR glasses, internally codenamed Phoenix (previously codenamed Puffin). Not to be confused with Orion, which is the

Gigabyte motherboards vulnerable to UEFI malware bypassing Secure Boot

Dozens of Gigabyte motherboard models run on UEFI firmware vulnerable to security issues that allow planting bootkit malware that is invisible to the operating system and can survive reinstalls. The vulnerabilities could allow attackers with local or remote admin permissions to execute arbitrary code in System Management Mode (SMM), an environment isolated from the operating system (OS) and with more privileges on the machine. Mechanisms running code below the OS have low-level hardware access

Making a Speedrun Timer in D

How I made a speedrun timer in D I semi-recently played through the original Deus Ex, and enjoyed my time with it so much that I felt like getting into speedrunning it, which ended up with me having to create a custom speedrun timer that “injects” itself into the game in order to implement features such as auto-splitting and load time removal. This article details the rough journey I went through. It’s not super well structured, but I was sorely lacking resources such as this when I was implem

Topics: 00 bytes game map memory

Serving a half billion requests per day with Rust and CGI

In my previous post Serving 200 million requests per day with a cgi-bin, I did some quick performance testing of CGI using a program written in Go. Go works excellently for CGI programs, for many of the same reasons it works so well for CLI programs and system daemons. But, out of curiosity, I decided to do a bit more CGI testing with other languages. CGI is good technology, actually# There’s a misconception that because CGI is old or because many CGI scripts had security vulnerabilities, CG

Topics: 00 bytes cgi mean total

ByteDance reportedly plans to release US-specific version of CapCut

In Brief TikTok owner ByteDance is planning to move U.S. users to a new version of CapCut, its video editing app, according to a report from Business Insider. Launching a U.S.-specific app could be part of the company’s broader plan to comply with a 2024 law requiring ByteDance to divest from TikTok and its other U.S. assets, or risk being forced to cease operations in the country. ByteDance is also reportedly developing a new version of TikTok for U.S. users ahead of an expected sale of the

Can an email go 500 miles in 2025?

Once upon a time, there was a university president who couldn’t send an email more than 500 miles, and the wise sysadmin said that’s not possible, so the president said come to my office, and lo and behold, the emails stopped before going 500 miles. Has technology improved? Can we send an email farther than 500 miles in 2025? There’s a lot to the story that’s obviously made up, but if we fix the details so that it can happen, we can reproduce it. connect We need some code to do a nonblocking

US TikTok users may soon have to switch to a new version of the app

ByteDance is said to be building a new, US-only version of the TikTok app that it will release on September 5. According to The Information , the company is moving ahead with this plan to comply with legislation requiring it to sell its TikTok business in the US or face a nationwide ban . The report suggests that folks in the US will have to switch to the new app (dubbed "M2") in order to keep using TikTok. It's said that ByteDance will remove the existing TikTok app (which the company internal

Corrected UTF-8 (2022)

UTF-8 is decent and all but it contains some design errors, partly because its original designers just messed up, and partly because of ISO and Unicode Consortium internal politics. We’re probably going to be using it forever so it would be good to correct these design errors before they get any more entrenched than they already have. Corrected UTF-8 is almost the same as UTF-8. We make only three changes: overlength encodings become impossible instead of just forbidden; the C1 controls and the

Topics: 80 bf byte sequence utf

Pluto is a unique dialect of Lua with a focus on general-purpose programming

Why should you choose Pluto? Accelerated Development. Greatly enhanced standard library. Several new syntaxes, such as switch statements, compound operators, ternary expressions, etc. Focused On Lua Compatibility. Pluto is largely compatible with Lua 5.4 source code, but there is an imperfection: Pluto implements new keywords, which can cause conflicts with otherwise normal identifiers such as 'switch', or 'class'. The parser tries to identify what is meant but if that doesn't work, you ca

Malwarebytes Antivirus Review 2025: Decent Software, Terrible Customer Service

CNET’s expert staff reviews and rates dozens of new products and services each month, building on more than a quarter century of expertise. 7.0 / 10 SCORE Malwarebytes Antivirus Buy at Malwarebytes Score Breakdown Performance 8 /10 Security 9 /10 Customer Support 4 /10 Usability 7 /10 Value 5 /10 Features 9 /10 Pros Free malware scanning and browser safety tools Decent VPN Impressive privacy policies Excellent dark web monitoring tools Cons Free version doesn’t provide real-time protection

The bitter lesson is coming for tokenization

The Bitter Lesson is coming for Tokenization 24 Jun, 2025 a world of LLMs without tokenization is desirable and increasingly possible Published on 24/06/2025 • ⏱️ 29 min read In this post, we highlight the desire to replace tokenization with a general method that better leverages compute and data. We'll see tokenization's role, its fragility and we'll build a case for removing it. After understanding the design space, we'll explore the potential impacts of a recent promising candidate (Byte

The Bitter Lesson is coming for Tokenization

The Bitter Lesson is coming for Tokenization 24 Jun, 2025 a world of LLMs without tokenization is desirable and increasingly possible Published on 24/06/2025 • ⏱️ 29 min read In this post, we highlight the desire to replace tokenization with a general method that better leverages compute and data. We'll see tokenization's role, its fragility and we'll build a case for removing it. After understanding the design space, we'll explore the potential impacts of a recent promising candidate (Byte

TikTok parent ByteDance is shutting down its short-lived book publisher

In Brief TikTok parent ByteDance’s book publisher 8th Note Press is closing up shop, according to a report from The Bookseller. Through its #BookTok community, TikTok has become an irreplaceable engine for publishers to drive book sales; even self-published authors have found unprecedented success by capturing a viral moment on TikTok. TikTok’s parent company took the next logical step in 2023, figuring that if the app was revolutionizing book sales, then it may as well cash in on selling its