Performance

Thermite SIMD — write your kernel once, let Rust melt every CPU you own

Thermite SIMD — write your kernel once, let Rust melt every CPU you own

“Melt your CPU” is a joke. The library is not.

I have a soft spot for projects whose tagline is slightly unhinged. Thermite SIMD, a Rust library that popped up on r/rust this week, describes itself with four words: “Melt your CPU.” The README then immediately clarifies that …

The LuaJIT bug that silently poisoned hot loops — and the Lua community that won't move forward

The LuaJIT bug that silently poisoned hot loops — and the Lua community that won't move forward

The bug

Here’s a sentence that should terrify anyone who writes performance-sensitive code: a function that never executes can slow down a completely unrelated hot loop by 20x.

That’s not a hypothetical. That’s what was documented this week in an investigation on r/programming — …

The Assembly Hall of Shame — or why making CPUs slow is an art form

The Assembly Hall of Shame — or why making CPUs slow is an art form

The project that asks: how slow can a single instruction be?

There’s a GitHub repo that’s been making the rounds on r/programming this week: asm-hall-of-shame, by the legendary xoreaxeaxeax (the same person behind the Movfuscator — a compiler that produces binaries using only mov …