Does vibe coding risk destroying the Open Source ecosystem? According to a pre-print paper by a number of high-profile researchers, this might indeed be the case based on observed patterns and some modelling. Their warnings mostly center around the way that user interaction is pulled away from OSS projects, while also making starting a new […]
Not everyone will write their own optimizing compiler from scratch, but those who do sometimes roll into it during the course of ever-growing project scope creep. People like [Michael Moroz], who wrote up a long and detailed article on the why and how. Specifically, a ‘small library’ involving a few matrix operations for a Unity-based […]
Your new project really could use a block device for Linux. File systems are easy to do with FUSE, but that’s sometimes too high-level. But a block driver can be tough to write and debug, especially since bugs in the kernel’s space can be catastrophic. [Jiri Pospisil] suggests Ublk, a framework for writing block devices […]
We are always amused that we can run emulations or virtual copies of yesterday’s computers on our modern computers. In fact, there is so much power at your command now that you can run, say, a DOS emulator on a Windows virtual machine under Linux, even though the resulting DOS prompt would probably still perform […]
An important aspect in software engineering is the ability to distinguish between premature, unnecessary, and necessary optimizations. A strong case can be made that the initial design benefits massively from optimizations that prevent well-known issues later on, while unnecessary optimizations are those simply do not make any significant difference either way. Meanwhile ‘premature’ optimizations are […]
The cache hierarchy of the 2008 Intel Nehalem x86 architecture. (Source: Intel) Writing good, performant code depends strongly on an understanding of the underlying hardware. This is especially the case in scenarios like those involving embarrassingly parallel processing, which at first glance ought to be a cakewalk. With multiple threads doing their own thing without […]
If you’re building a project on your ESP32, you might want to give it a fancy graphical interface. If so, you might find a display library from [dejwk] to be particularly useful. Named roo_display for unclear reasons, the library is Arduino-compatible, and suits a wide range of ESP32 boards out in the wild. It’s intended […]
In today’s Chromed-up world it can be hard to remember an era where browsers could be extended with not just extensions, but also with plugins. Although for those of us who use traditional Netscape-based browsers like Pale Moon the use of plugins has never gone away, for the rest of the WWW’s users their choice […]
[neos-builder] wrote in to let us know about their innovation: the HORUS Framework — Hybrid Optimized Robotics Unified System — a production-grade robotics framework built in Rust for real-time performance and memory safety. This is a batteries included system which aims to have everything you might need available out of the box. [neos-builder] said their […]
If you’re gonna be a hacker eventually you’re gonna have to write code. And if you write code eventually you’re gonna have to deal with concurrency. Concurrency is what we call it when parts of our program run at the same time. That could be because of something fairly straightforward, like multiple threads, or multiple […]