Author Archives: Josh

upb status and preliminary performance numbers

Posted on April 25, 2011 by Josh

The last few weeks have been very exciting for upb. On April 1 I checked in a JIT compiler for parsing protobufs, which one might think was an April Fool’s joke, but it’s real and the performance numbers so far … Continue reading →

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ARM architecture is mired in oppressive legalese

Posted on April 18, 2011 by Josh

My Efika MX Smarttop came and I’ve had some fun compiling upb for it and trying it out. I don’t have a pressing ARM use case yet, but I want to work ahead a bit and get familiar with the … Continue reading →

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EINTR and PC loser-ing (The “Worse Is Better” case study)

Posted on April 18, 2011 by Josh

Richard Gabriel’s 1989 essay Worse Is Better is a famous comparison between LISP and Unix/C that pops up from time to time and is guaranteed to spark a spirited discussion. The philosophical argument itself is not something I want to … Continue reading →

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Addicted to hardware: new toy on the way

Posted on March 31, 2011 by Josh

I’m addicted to hardware. I can’t stop thinking about all of the CPUs that currently exist, how they compare to each other, and how to write the fastest possible code on them. (Actually I want to learn FPGA programming too, … Continue reading →

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When a compiler’s slow code actually bites you

Posted on March 19, 2011 by Josh

A few days ago I posted GCC: the impressive and the disappointing where I looked at some cases where GCC produces not-quite-optimal code. One of the comments on that post was (emphasis mine): So, it seems like there is a … Continue reading →

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