History of the Web - Web Browser Engineering: https://browser.engineering/history.html

From ‘guix environment’ to ‘guix shell’ - Ludovic Courtès @ GNU Guix: http://guix.gnu.org/en/blog/2021/from-guix-environment-to-guix-shell/

Leo Editor: https://www.leoeditor.com/

An SSD for the Pi - JLelse: https://jlelse.blog/thoughts/2021/10/pi-ssd

Aren't SD cards SSD though?

An interesting probabilistic datastructure is called "bloom filters", which can quickly tell you whether an item's possibly in a set or definitely not. Useful for when the true check is very expensive.

The way they work is by allocating a finite number of bits, and using a hash function to determine which, say, 3 bits should be set for any given item you'd want to check. To add an item (you can't remove them) you enable those bits to 1. To check an item you see if they're all already 1.

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I got the GNU Modula-2 compiler working on OpenBSD - Dr. Brian Robert Callahan: https://briancallahan.net/blog/20210403.html

Blocked an antivaxxer (who had apparantly previously been reported as racist) this morning. Next time I'll also unfollow whoever boosts such comments onto my timeline (forgot who that was this time).

Please take the vaccine as it becomes available to you, it will save lives!

@ekaitz_zarraga O.K., maybe it's not C semantics. Just GCC making the behaviour less undefined after warning you about it?

In C semantics uninitialized variables/fields defaults to 0, but this does not apply to using Assembly regs. So GCC has a `pass_initialize_regs` pass which sets pseudoregs to 0 on uninitialized codepaths.

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After reanalyzing dataflow with liveness analysis `pass_initialize_regs` iterates over codeblock, instructions therein, & use of each instruction skipping non-pseudo, PIC, already moved regs. It checks per-codeblock bitmasks to determine whether to emit a new store & update indices.

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Vintage Chip Collection - Niconiconi: https://niconiconi.neocities.org/posts/vintage-chip-collection/

Zig, Skia, Clojure, Geometry and the Japanese TV Show: ICFP Contest 2021 - Nikita Prokopov: https://tonsky.me/blog/icfpc-2021/

How you as a site author can help comprehension - Caroline Crespo @ TPGi: https://www.tpgi.com/how-you-as-a-site-author-can-help-comprehension/

A Vim Guide for Veteren Users - The Valuable Dev: https://thevaluable.dev/vim-veteran/

Hardware Memory Models - research!rsc: http://research.swtch.com/hwmm

MutantC V3: https://mutantc.gitlab.io/mutantC_V3.html

@ekaitz_zarraga No, it's not rhetorical.

How does it differ from other object formats? Why does it require so much more code?

"Binary" executable files contains more than raw machine code your CPU's control unit can *directly* understand. There's additional labelling for our sake, & for linkers (though I haven't gotten through *that* code yet).

Whilst today's topic GNU Binutils contains a suite of commands, the core of *most* of them is libbfd. LibBFD's headerfiles are predominantly C structs & macros defining the numerous formats (including archive files) GNU supports, it also implements methodtables for them.

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Usually the read & write implementations for each format doesn't take that much code, but ELF for some reason takes a lot more. Can anyone please explain what ELF is about?

LibBFD also provides e.g. a hashmap implementation as being central to many GNU Binutils commands.

There's several trivial (or at least as trivial as C gets) commands, though I'll have to discuss the major commands over the next two days...

2/2 Fin, for now! Next: GNU Assembler & linkers.

I strongly considered applying for this role myself (I think I'd be a strong candidate), but I decided I'm currently fine career-wise: https://www.torproject.org/about/jobs/tor-browser-developer/

Maybe it should go to someone with more C++ experience? Is that you?