Low-needle-drop Christmas trees are willing to delay their revenge: they wait until you remove them from the house before dropping dry, sharp, needles everywhere.

A few weeks ago I gave a talk "Some Things I've Learned About Software" that was unusual for me. I didn't program in it once. I didn't mention specific technologies. Instead I tried to look at the high-level things about software that I've slowly understood. www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJgD...

More PLISS speakers announced! pliss.org/2026/

I can't quite believe that we're now announcing the eighth Programming Language Implementation Summer School (PLISS), but we are --- in May next year, if you want to learn more about programming language implementations, this is the place to come!

email has many detractors -- and I certainly grumble from time to time when I'm ploughing my way through mine -- but we still haven't come up with a sufficiently superior option for asynchronous communication that would make the pain of transition worth it.

For those interested in hearing me waffle about software in a public talk this Thursday in London, there's still a few hours left to register! www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/informatic...

This year's weather has apparently decided it's not going to muck around with any of that nonsense in the 5-12C range. On the plus side, some of my "summer" walks are doable again and they look lovely in the cold mornings!

Amongst the pleasures of living in Somerset is our village and street names. On Sunday, for example, I cycled through Gurney Slade and up Binegar Bottom. Note: I have checked this message carefully for typos.

This weekend my wife wanted to watch a film called The Princess Bride. I hadn't heard of it. I was thus, to put it mildly, surprised to gradually realise that it has generated as many widespread memes as franchises seemingly 100x better known!

New post: "Async and finaliser deadlocks", based on an accidental poke from a recent episode of the excellent @oxide.computer podcast tratt.net/laurie/blog/...

Somewhat delayed because of Covid, I'm finally going to give my "inaugural lecture", which is a short, hopefully accessible, public talk: in my case "Some things I've learned about software"! All are welcome!

One thing pizauth could really do with is zsh completion: we have bash and fish but not yet zsh. PRs welcome! github.com/ltratt/pizau...

New post: "What Context Can Bring to Terminal Mouse Clicks", explaining how one can click on filenames with line numbers in my terminal and have the "correct" editor instance jump to that file and line. A hack, or pragmatic use of existing tools? You decide! tratt.net/laurie/blog/...

grmtools-0.14.0 is out github.com/softdevteam/... -- mostly "quality of life" changes that e.g. make understanding errors easier, but there are a few minor breaking changes that meant the version bump was necessary.

I've been using Alacritty for a fair while, but a very useful feature doesn't seem likely to be accepted (github.com/alacritty/al...) so it's time to move on. I need a modern terminal which run commands on matched text and sends me the terminal title. Any suggestions?

As someone who came to modal editing rather late, I'm still unsure whether it's a good idea -- but I'm used to it now! This post has an interesting argument, pointing out how few programs are modal, and what we might learn from that. buttondown.com/hillelwayne/...

Are there any benchmarks (etc) which show the costs of the SysV x64 ABI relative to a somewhat-or-perfectly-optimal ABI for that program? [Not for single microbenchmarks, because I can definitely create horrible overheads there, but on larger programs / benchmarks.]

Although I'd prefer it if the trees stayed green all year around, if the leaves are going to fall, I'm rather happy that they do so in such a colourful way. It brings a new way of looking at old favourites.

Here's a visualisation of the evolution of our "Garbage Collection for Rust: The Finalizer Frontier" paper. The animation renders each git commit in the paper's history as a frame, with the time of the commit shown in the bottom right. The full hi-res version can be found at youtu.be/zC866HybCp8

New paper with @jakehughes.uk : Garbage Collection for Rust: The Finalizer Frontier. There are lots of GCs for Rust: we tried pushing as far as we could in a new direction, particularly looking at what can be done about the headache that is finalizers.

Stourhead's Pantheon looked rather fine yesterday.

One surprising thing about writing a compiler is the variance in day-to-day productivity. Some days I write fewer than 10LoC. Some days, like today, 1500LoC is possible. Even more surprisingly, the former days are much more taxing than the latter!

Train announcements continue to surprise: "we're running late because a train ahead hit a swan".

I sometimes wonder to myself: what do normal folk think when they see the result of a (classic) software bug like the below?

Another person has left a negative review for our local graveyard.

New post: Why Firsts Matter tratt.net/laurie/blog/...

I like articles which challenge our assumptions, even when I only partly agree with them. This article posits that type systems in programming languages are a poor substitute for different architectures of software systems. programmingsimplicity.substack.com/p/type-check...

When I upgraded my OpenSSH a couple of weeks back, I started getting some surprising (to me) warnings when using GitHub. I'm not sure I'd enjoy being the person who has to upgrade the fleet of servers that are now being fingered as culprits!

Register allocation is one of those things that seems like it should take 2 days to implement. Everyone I've ever spoken to about it has found all sorts of surprises that cause those 2 days to balloon. This great post will save future folk much time! bernsteinbear.com/blog/linear-...

I have been a Unix user for a... long time... yet only today did I accidentally discover that `:` is a built-in shell no-opt.

Finally, 3 years and 3 months after I bought a Framework laptop, there is an update for the (frankly, pretty poor) BIOS. But... it doesn't work. It says it does, but nothing is updated. Thankfully I eventually stumbled on this post community.frame.work/t/unable-to-... -- what a pallava!

New post: LLM Inflation tratt.net/laurie/blog/...

New post: Comparing the Glove80 and Maltron keyboards tratt.net/laurie/blog/...

The LLM-for-software Yo-yo tratt.net/laurie/blog/...

New blog post by @cfbolz.bsky.social: "How fast can the RPython GC allocate?" pypy.org/posts/2025/0...

Brian Wilson's life, to the extent I ever been able to tell, was not a happy one overall. His obituaries inevitably lead with Pet Sounds, the drama with Smile, and its aftermath.

CPU performance is a fascinating topic. In one way, the differences between newer generations is quite small. In another, it can be quite big. I now regularly benchmark on a fairly new and several fairly old server CPUs, and the differences have surprised me.

LR parsing is the static typing of parsing: if your grammar is provably LR, you've ruled out a whole class of ways it can go wrong. Every time I've examined a non-LR parser, it has had unexpected bugs: parsers are hard to get right!

I have wondered for a while why SSL libraries have proliferated: now I have an answer, even if it's much different and longer than I expected www.haproxy.com/blog/state-o...

A question I've intermittently asked people is: how likely it was that we picked the perfect material for transistors -- i.e. silicon -- so early on? Since my answer was "not likely", I assumed, with zero evidence or expertise, that something better probably exists.

One of the great joys of being an optimist is that I not only say, but nearly always mean, "better late than never". "Too little, too late" does not seem to me an enjoyable way of viewing life.

snare-0.4.12 out, which solves the "time dependency doesn't compile on recent versions of rustc" issue tratt.net/laurie/src/s...

On Linux, is CLOCK_BOOTTIME similar to CLOCK_MONOTONIC (non-strictly monotonic) or CLOCK_MONOTONIC_RAW (strictly monotonic)? The manpage I have says it's "identical to CLOCK_MONOTONIC", but that would seem the odder of the two choices to me, so I hope the description is wrong!

As I like to do occasionally, I've been pulling apart some songs recently. Every time I do this, I learn something new, even for songs I thought I knew inside out. This time what became obvious to me is how much more fun music recorded without a click track is.

As CPUs have become better at optimising code -- but necessarily more complex -- I've become increasingly surprised by the performance differences of "normal" looking code across CPU generations. Sometimes I can guess at causes, but mostly I end up bemused.

New post: The Fifth Kind of Optimisation tratt.net/laurie/blog/...

New post: The Fifth Kind of Optimisation tratt.net/laurie/blog/...

Will no-one think of the children?

A very interesting retrospective on using Sea of Nodes in V8 and the pros and (seemingly in the majority) cons v8.dev/blog/leaving...

New post: Better Shell History Search tratt.net/laurie/blog/...