Currently listening to Tim Schmidt giving a talk on Alumina in Sydney #Rustlang remote meetup; in 1 hours time I'll give a talk on Nova #JavaScript engine and data-oriented design. Jump into the call if that sounds interesting! rustsyd.daily.co/meetup-2025-...

I have activated our base component's trap card: every internal property is depended upon by some external user, at least in tests, and doing anything like removing the writability of purely internal details runs directly into a wall of pain. I'm not happy.

Went and did a quick data collection on the relative frequency of GitHub issues mentioning "crash" or "sefault"/"segmentation fault" in #Rustlang, #Ziglang, #C++, and #C. Selected 10 most starred repositories that use GH issues. Not the most scientific data selection, but it was fun!

Well that was a very interesting #Rustlang pre-RFC text! Effectively arguing that Rust is painting itself into a substructural type system corner, and should recognise this as a fact and take the theoretical framework into focus when applying the paint. As a logician by training, I'm all for it!

Hey #JavaScript / #TypeScript hive-mind: are you aware of any high-performance, memory-efficient directed acyclic graph libraries? I'm going to embark on a quest to write a TypedArray Struct-of-Arrays based DAG for a specific use case, and I'm pondering if any prior art exists already.

In one of my two choirs, I am the only bass singer in rehearsals this autumn: I feel I am BaaS, or Bass as a Service.

"Maintainer compromises used to be rare." I'm an old-timey maintainer: you can bet your ass I'll never compromise! /joke

There is also another option: make the JavaScript engine itself aggressively memory optimised and its GC compacting, so that fragmentation is eliminated. I had similar frustrations and @trynova.dev was the answer I came up with. It's not a fully ready engine, but maybe it's worth a look for you.

If you're using @zed.dev and want to follow along with Nova #JavaScript engine development (or you're just interested in looking at some #Rustlang development live on air), then hop in here: zed.dev/channel/nova... I've not really used the collaboration features much and I'm interested to try.

It's been a while but I'm #streaming again; #Rustlang doesn't allow mixed-size atomics or data races but #JavaScript does, so I have to write inline assembly to try mitigate the blast radius of breaking the C++/Rust memory model. Nice! www.twitch.tv/aapoalas

#streaming Nova #JavaScript #TypeScript engine development again. I think today I'll be optimising the interpreter loop; taking a data-oriented look at what are the most common instructions that the VM performs and making sure those handlers are at the top of the instruction cache. #Rustlang

I proposed a talk on Nova JavaScript engine to JSConf.jp but unfortunately didn't make the cut :( I proposed to give the talk in Japanese, so that would've been fun: last time I've given talks in Japanese was back at Kobe University 10 years ago. I guess now I at least don't need to travel.

I was today years old when I realised that Go the programming language's name has a callback (intentional or not) to Google. I am also today years old wondering if Google is telling me to go ogle things, and if so then what?

#Streaming some more Nova #JavaScript / #TypeScript development; #programming a JS engine in #Rustlang and today I'm tackling SharedArrayBuffers and perhaps the Atomics API later. www.twitch.tv/aapoalas

I got my name into SystemTap's git commits. Nice! sourceware.org/git/?p=syste...

#Streaming Nova #JavaScript #TypeScript development again! Time to do some bpftrace #programming to set up nice debugging scripts before I merge our USDT PR! www.twitch.tv/aapoalas

And this is what we end up with: github.com/oxidecompute... I think the linkers have won this round, SystemTap is probably(?) also adding the "R" flag to make sure linkers don't drop the base section. Nothing changes the fact that we have possibly a ton of misassembled exes out there. Oh well.

Maybe this is related? github.com/iovisor/bcc/...

I'm losing hope for tracing on Linux: not only mold but also LLD and Gold will GC out the .stapsdt.base section out of executables if given half a chance. At least locally that makes executables not trigger USDTs and/or crash when traced. bpftrace just doesn't trigger, Linux perf crashes. 1/5

Is anyone aware of implementations of the Tiny Pointers / Krapivin hash table from arxiv.org/abs/2501.02305? Specifically, I'm interested in if the optimal bounds enable performance improvements in the physical world as well. (Compare to Cuckoo hashing, which is perfect but slow on real hardware.)

And now I'm an even deeper mess: Mold considers this to be not-a-bug, and that the ELF header/section should be generated with the "Retain" flag. This is certainly possible, but no SystemTap USDT generating library during these past 15 years has done that. Do I change that, or just stop using mold?

I figured it out (I'm pretty sure). Mold linker was GC'ing an ELF header that SystemTap USDTs need for handling linker relocations. Tracing such an executable would then touch the wrong places, leading to corruption and !FUN!

Soo... I did a thing github.com/oxidecompute... and am now putting it into use in Nova #JavaScript engine and I find that there is some issues, like segfaults when using perf stat. Want to come look at me struggle with this memory safety violation in Rust? Hop on. #streaming #Rustlang #programming

Right, time to stream some more! Struct-of-Arrays vector creation in #Rustlang it is!

#Streaming creating a custom Struct-of-Arrays Vector for Nova #JavaScript engine in #Rustlang Jump in if you want to see someone struggle with low-level details of allocations and whatnot.

1.5 hour stream, let's see if we couldn't implement RegExp.prototype.split in that time? #streaming #Rustlang Nova #JavaScript engine #programming

Alright, here's what we're going to do! We'll implement the rest of Regex.prototype and maybe related String.prototype methods in Nova #JavaScript engine, and then we'll see how far that takes us with RegExp tests; the rest is up to our RegExp engine. #streaming #Rustlang #programming

@burntsushi.net I thought you might find this interesting: github.com/tc39/tg5/blo... "We present our on-going study of JavaScript regexes... we even present the first linear-time algorithm to support unrestricted lookarounds." I thought that sounds pretty cool at least!

Time to stream some Nova JavaScript engine development again! I'm refactoring my [[Set]] internal method to handle property lookup caches, allowing me to remove a "cached Set" variant. Just gotta do the i's and cross the t's. www.twitch.tv/aapoalas #JavaScript #streaming #programming #Rustlang

Starting my journey into adding and implementing a Reborrow trait into #Rustlang! First time I really dig into the rust repository, and into building it.

Kind of a funny, new failure mode for a software developer's code editor: Newest Nvidia drivers or Linux kernel had some change break @zed.dev I'm well accustomed to games sometimes having problems with GPU driver updates, but first time with my editor. To be expected with GPU rendering of course!

#Streaming some #Rustlang refactoring in Nova #JavaScript engine. Three Get/Set methods is one too many!

#streaming Nova #JavaScript engine #programming again; I think it's time we take up the semantic analysis that our OXC parser provides. The first place to use it will be to cache global property lookups.

Marble Sounds compile ses 2 Meters Sessions et c’est magnifique www.sunburnsout.com/marble-sound...

Sunday #streaming Nova #JavaScript / #TypeScript engine #programming Property lookup caches are really doing my head in!

More #streaming Nova #JavaScript engine #programming in #Rustlang. I have gotten over the painful hump that was figuring out how to do caching with non-ordinary Objects. Now to just hammer it home!

#Streaming again, continuing from where I left off with Nova #JavaScript engine. We're putting property lookup caches into more places, figuring out where expression property lookups actually translate statically to property identifer lookups. #Rustlang #programming

#streaming Nova #JavaScript / #TypeScript development again: I think it's time to see about expanding our property lookup cache system to support set operations. #Rustlang #programming

Alright, let's try this streaming thing again! Nearly got kicked out of my office into the guestroom but in the end a bunch of Internet cabling was done (on the ceiling) and I have myself mostly functional Internet. #streaming Nova #Javascript #TypeScript engine #programming in #Rustlang

Time to stream Nova #JavaScript engine development again; I've been squashing some bugs in especially Array's [[DefineOwnProperty]] handling, but some still remain. #streaming #Rustlang #programming

Writing property lookup caches and especially the invalidation strategies in Nova #JavaScript engine has been pretty fun indeed. When removing a property from an object being used as a prototype, any cache that pointed to that property OR a property after it must invalidate; no surprise there...

Time to stream Nova #JavaScript engine development again. Last time(ish) I got Object Shapes into a good place and took them into use when creating with statically knowable shapes. Now it's time to implement the first property lookup caches, come follow along! #Rustlang #programming #streaming

Did you know vegetarians make the best lovers? They really know how to beat meat.

Everyone is happy under the #C banner. Or wait, was that something else...?

I'm feeling pretty proud of myself: last November/December I figured out how USDTs work in Linux and implemented it in @oxide.computer's excellent usdt crate, but I lost focus before making all the tests pass as they relied on dtrace. But last night I figured out bpftrace to make the tests pass!

Time to stream again; continuing the Object Shape work that I left off at on Friday. Come watch how Nova #JavaScript engine is made! #streaming #programming #Rustlang

Time to stream some more over at Twitch: I merged Object Shapes support to Nova #JavaScript engine yesterday, but today I find myself rewriting the APIs to be a bit more specialised and possibly ergonomic. Maybe also getting to 8 byte Objects today? #programming #stream #Rustlang #performance

It's been a couple of weeks; I was mostly AFK on sort of a summer vacation. Now it's time to get back to Nova #JavaScript engine programming! Today I'm working on Object Shapes; this is the foremost performance optimisation in JS engines, come see how it's done! #streaming #Rustlang #programming

New blog post: I am a Rust compiler engineer looking for a new job nnethercote.github.io/2025/07/18/l...

So I ended up updating my Deno libclang bindings after a long hiatus, and as often happens I'm finding all sorts of improvements to make, especially around memory management. @bcantrill.bsky.social's comment on it being really hard for two C programmers code to interface safely is heavy on my mind.