About: A collection of links and short
commentary, published weekly. In theory the inclusion criteria
are for it to be something I read last week (duh) and was either
particularly interesting or something I might want to refer to
later.
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long-form writing.
Branch PredictionHow compilers decide when to use branches vs. when to use conditional moves.
Bad Record Mac A user reports that loading web pages from a MirageOS server occasionally trips an "impossible" TLS error condition. Turns out the Xen network driver for Mirage had a bug that corrupted packets under sufficient load. Problem not caught by transport layer since the router accepted TCP packets with invalid checksums (no validation), and then updated the checksums by recomputing them from scratch rather doing incremental update.
Design problems of Solidity> Solidity has far worse problems than not being an advanced research language. Just being a sanely designed normal language would be a big step up. Solidity is so riddled with bizarre design errors it makes PHP 4 look like a work of genius.
It's the contract programming language for Ethereum, where bugs in contracts lead to $10M cyber-heists. And if you read the details, the quoted bit is actually a fair summary...