just-js

i ported some of the FFI experiments i have been hacking on in my lo runtime over to @nodejs. this should work (with many caveats) on linux x64/arm64 (including Raspberry Pi 3B onwards) and macos/arm64. and yes, it's pretty ffast. 🏃🚀 /1 github.com/just-js/ffast

TypeScript 7.0 Beta is out 🎉 It's the 10x faster Go-based port 🔥 🔷 `tsgo` vs `tsc` CLIs allow comparing 🔷 --checkers sets checker thread count 🔷 --singleThreaded keeps parsing/emit/checking together 🔷 TS 6.0 deprecations are hard errors 🔷 API access is planned for TS 7.1

"the agent produced coherent rationales for each decision. The reasoning was surface-level, tracking the prompt’s framing more than the state of the coding work"

Bacteria move around using a molecular machine called the flagellar motor that rotates faster than the flywheel of a race car engine and switches directions in an instant. After 50 yrs, scientists have finally figured out how it works. “My lifelong quest is now fulfilled.” Link⤵️

The simdutf library provides fast Unicode and base64 encoding/decoding functions. It is used by mainstream browsers (Chromium, Safari), Node.js, Bun @ladybirdbrowser, Ghostty, and so forth. I am happy to announce a new major release with contributions by @mitchellh, @yagiznizipli, @PaulDreik It is our ninth major release. It is a big deal. It has been a lot of work!!! Get it at github.com/simdutf/simdutf

These two things are about the same size "2nm" transistor gate pitch : 42nm Flagellum motor : 45nm

I often need to explore Windows kernel crashdumps when I'm on Linux/macOS. WinDbg unfortunatelly doesn't work in Wine. So... I did a thing. It's multiplatform - doesn't depend on dbgeng.dll nor DIA. WinDbg-flavored. And it's fast. Really fast. github.com/vmi-rs/ephemera

Mike Stonebraker is a Turing award winner famous for his fundamental contributions to databases (e.g. Postgres, C-Store and much more). I interviewed him recently about: • The story behind Postgres & the hardest technical challenge in building it • Where he disagreed with Google's technical decisions • Future problems in databases • Literature recommendations to learn databases • Why LLMs score 0% on his text-SQL benchmark • What if you replaced all state in an OS with a DB Timestamps: 0:00 - Intro 1:03 - How he got into databases 6:43 - Competing with Oracle 9:07 - What made Postgres special 15:55 - One size fits none 21:37 - Why he disagreed with Google 29:14 - Why he chose academia over big tech 30:58 - Replacing state in an OS with a DB 42:02 - Future problems in databases 51:36 - Technical book recommendations to learn databases 52:20 - Advice for younger self 55:52 - Outro Where to watch: • YouTube: youtu.be/YPObBOwIrHk • Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/1zxBGj… • Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the… • Transcript: developing.dev/p/turing-award…

everyone thinks eBPF = fancy tcpdump. no. it's basically a safe little VM inside your kernel and people are abusing it in wild ways: - sched_ext lets you write your linux CPU scheduler in userspace. yes. swap out CFS for your own logic. gaming, latency-critical trading, AI workloads — all getting custom schedulers now. - SO_REUSEPORT + eBPF = you pick which socket gets the packet. consistent hashing load balancing with zero proxy, zero hop. Cloudflare does this, Katran (FB's L4 LB) does 10M+ pps with XDP. - uprobes on SSL_read/SSL_write means you can see decrypted TLS traffic without MITM or cert tricks. just hook libssl in-process. sounds illegal, isn't. - BPF LSM hooks — literally write kernel security policy as a program. Tetragon, Falco, bpflock all doing runtime enforcement that SELinux could only dream of. - computational storage offload — people are running eBPF on the SSD itself. compute near the bytes, skip the PCIe round trip. wild stuff. - and yes there's eBPF rootkits (ebpfkit, TripleCross) hiding processes and hijacking syscalls from the kernel. defensive tech is also offensive tech, always. oh and windows has eBPF now too btw. the "linux thing" era is over, this is becoming the universal safe-code-in-kernel standard. tldr: if you're still using eBPF just for bpftrace one-liners you're leaving like 90% of the power on the table by the way you can check this nice repo with a lot of interesting eBPF-based tools: github.com/qmonnet/awesom… #ebpf #networking #cilium #cloud #devops #sre #kubernetes #k8s

AI agents are far more cable when they have full system access; but when they do, they can mess a lot of stuff up (not unique to any one model). AI harnesses have guardrails: but those can fail. I wonder if we’ll need OS-level “sandbox primitives” to deal with this better?

It's kind of crazy how much of the way we've been designing Workers over the past 9 years unexpectedly turns out to be so relevant to AI and agents. Durable Objects and lightweight isolate sandboxes are obvious big things. But there are subtler things. Consider "bindings". In Workers, our environment (`env` object) doesn't just contain strings. It can contain live objects, which we often call "bindings". For instance, a Workers KV binding is a live object representing a Workers KV storage namespace. Once you've configured it, you can just do: let val = await env.MYKV.get("foo") await env.MYKV.put("foo", "new value"); Notice: There's no connection string. No secret token that you have to pass to talk to your KV namespace. The Workers Runtime handles it for you. You just get an already-initialized client object, on which you can call methods. You can still do everything you want to do. But you know what you can't do? Leak the secret token. Because there isn't one. A KV namespace binding fundamentally cannot be "leaked" because it's not bytes. But over the years, a lot of people have questioned whether this really mattered. I've had people inside and outside the team say: "Why are you so weird, Kenton? Yeah sure it can't leak but now I have to learn this new way of thinking about things. No other runtime works this way so writing portable code takes extra work. I'd rather just stick to what I'm used to, and anyway I know better than to leak my environment variables." Well, now we have AI agents writing the code and... suddenly everyone is worried about agents leaking keys. People are creating convoluted schemes to intercept the outbound traffic and inject keys in a proxy, or trying to issue very-short-lived keys so that if the agent leaks them the window of attack is short. Ahem. Welcome, folks! We solved this 8 years ago! Here's an old blog post -- written when I personally was still very much Not Thinking About AI -- which seems so much more relevant now: blog.cloudflare.com/workers-enviro…

In the next version of Bun Bun's glibc minimum version drops from 2.26 to glibc 2.17 (released 14 years ago) This unblocks companies running Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 & Amazon Linux 1 from using Bun github.com/oven-sh/bun/pu…

Rustで書かれたTypeScriptのネイティブコンパイラ。 SWCでTypeScriptをパースし、LLVMで実行ファイルへと直接コンパイルする。 macOS/Windows/Linux/iOS/Android向けのクロスコンパイルに対応し、ネイティブUI… "" github.com/PerryTS/perry

Whoooa, this is legit! VB6 is back.

wise words from the best systems engineer I've worked with: "two things that make code actually maintainable: 1. reduce the layers a reader has to trace 2. reduce the state a reader has to hold in their head" applies to every codebase. always.

Where others use AI to “create”, at TigerBeetle we’re more excited about how to use the machines to “destroy”. Some see AI as a way to “type faster” or “increase productivity”, but at TigerBeetle I tell the team we’re already “too productive” (through TigerStyle), we want calm focused work not burnout… and we know that all the huge gains come from understanding anyway. So “destruction” aka testing, i.e. as a foil or sparring training partner, is where we see it’s at with AI. Not to create. That stays with the humans so we don’t atrophy our understanding, which is more valuable than “LOC”. But to increase quality through defense in depth in testing. But even there, the gains with AI are marginal, a few percent, compared to the 90% power of our DST, which again, came from systems thinking. So I encourage our team to “keep playing the violin yourself”, to keep practicing, keep training, keep investing in understanding.

i had this professor who insisted we code in C, read docs, and use vi. we all grumbled, calling it outdated and torturous. but in hindsight, he was the only one really teaching us how computers function, rather than just having us shuffle things around on a screen. now that I’ve seen frameworks fail, I can actually troubleshoot and fix issues.

I will admit: in 2023, I was VERY sceptical when I heard how @dhh and the team are planning their cloud exit. I assumed this would be breakeven, at best, when you calculate eg labor costs, maintenance, more work due to custom hardware etc. Numbers don't lie though. Wow:

Time Dilation kind of makes the whole “datacenters in space” idea more fun. Technically…something like a GPS Block III CPU runs an extra ~7,000 clock cycles per day compared to the same machine on earth. Extend this to the extreme, and you get the whole subfield of CS+physics called relativistic hypercompuation. There’s some (fun?) papers that allow you to solve the halting problem by placing yourself dangerously close to a black hole…while your computer safely computes for ~infinite-ish amounts of time. One of the better papers on this field appears to be: "Relativistic computers and the Turing barrier" (Németi & Dávid 2006) (sadly, the maximum speedup just escaping earths gravity well is something like 1 x 10 ^ (-10), so yeah the blackhole thing is kinda necessary)

⚡️Zig: Cloudflare wrote their Git implementation for Workers in Zig. Because it had to be compact, as complete as possible, extensible with features like notes and LFS, efficient, and compilable to WebAssembly. #zig #ziglang

I've contributed a patch to the venerable simdutf library by @lemire so that it can now be used with no dependency on libc++ at all. Libghostty is already updated so it now only depends on libc. I blogged about it here: mitchellh.com/writing/simdut…