Posts
Building Channels in C++: Part 3 - Closing channels
Published:Apr. 2, 2025 So far with our channels we've been able to send and receive messages. And in we gave channels a static size.However, we don't have a way to signal to all consuming (and producing) threads that a channel shouldn't be used anymore. Without this, we can't safely clean up channels since threads won't know that a channel is no longer safe to use…Building Channels in C++: Part 2 Limiting Size
Published:Apr. 1, 2025 In we built a channel that could send and receive messages. However, there was no bounds on how big the channel could get. Before we go much further, we should start adding limits to the channel size. Changing how we view memory will start to shape how we approach our channel going forward, so it's better to addres it sooner rather than later…Building Channels in C++: Part 1 - The Adventure Begins
Published:Mar. 31, 2025 This is part 1 of a series in building channels (and several channel-related features) in C++. For this series, we're going to focus on thread-based channels instead of coroutine or fiber based channels. Because of that, there will be some limitations on what we can do and how much concurrency we can support. Also, we'll be implementing our select loop differently than if we were writing it for Go. However, we'll gain a base understanding of how channels works, and we'll see different strategies for synchronizing and communicating between threads…Casting Values to Integers and Floats in JavaScript
Published:Mar. 19, 2025 This post is mostly a quick reference for me to share with people about how casting values to integers and floats work in JavaScript - and the weirdness that can happen…Creating Documents
Published:Feb. 24, 2025 When I was rewriting my blog, I was trying to decide what format to put the posts in. I wanted a format that works well for both print and web, and that can create HTML and PDF files. Additionally, I have a hard "self-host" requirement - whatever I do I need to be able to do on my own hardware and not a remote server. I did some research on different document formats. I came across three main categories (though I'm sure there are probably still more). The categories I came across are are: markup, typesetting, and GUI-based…Rewriting my site generator
Published:Feb. 21, 2025 Lately I've been rewriting my site generator behind my blog. The old one was really finicky, had a terrible parsing strategy, and also wasn't what I actually wanted long term. Also, due to how I wrote the generator it was getting hard to add new features. Plus, every time I started it up I had to deal with NPM giving me a bunch of security vulnerability alerts since my XML parser was outdated. But, the next version of the parser was a completely different API for parsing and traversing XML documents, which would have required a rewrite just to get rid of those printouts. Additionally, I've been rewriting all my posts from Markdown to LaTeX so that I can print them out nicely, and I didn't want to keep maintaining two versions of my blog (one for print and one for web)…Generics in C
Published:Jan. 25, 2025 As part of my recent tour of languages, I have started using C again. Particularly, I've been using C11 and have been exploring the new additions. One such addition is Generics. I decided to try to use Generics to see how far I could push the feature to find its limitations. To do this, I chose implementing some data structures - in my case porting over Zig's slices. While there was some benefit, there were also quite a few headaches and limitations…Why I Stopped Using Go (For Now)
Published:Dec. 12, 2024 This year I had made a goal to learn Go. I've had many starts and stops with learning Go, but I wanted to at least make a full program in Go this year (that wasn't from a tutorial)…Fast CSV parsing in Zig
Published:Nov. 7, 2024 Recently, I was using Zig and was trying to avoid memory allocations. My program was generating data based on user input, but I needed a way to format the data for use in other programs. I was also only keeping one record in memory at a time to limit memory usage. So, I wanted a data format that could write a single record at a time, and I wanted to write to a writer so I could write straight to a socket or disk as needed. I also wanted to avoid introducing memory allocations while serializing. The first thing I did was look at the Zig standard library, but I couldn't find anything that fit my needs. I also looked at some libraries, but didn't find anything there. So I wrote my own CSV encoder, which wasn't very hard. But, once I got a writer I thought "how hard is it to write a fast CSV parser?" That question turned into a much bigger project, so let's dive in…TigerBeetle and NASA reliability
Published:Oct. 31, 2024 Last time I posted I talked about Erlang and how it has built-in error recovery to maintain reliable systems. Erlang's error recovery is based on monitoring processes and automatically restarting subsystems to a known good state when a process fails. This happens at the cost of any data inside of the restarted processes. The built-in error recovery allows Erlang to keep functioning even in the face of errors, network partitions, and bugs. It's an interesting paradigm since it approaches the problem differently than more traditional "try/catch what you can and crash otherwise" mentality…