10 Jul 25

Some lovely, old-Internet notes about interesting bit hackery you can use for all kinds of purposes. I really like these for implementing “scalar SIMD” (i.e. treating 64-bit integers as 8x8-bit integer vectors) optimizations.

by bal4e 7 months ago saved 2 times
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27 Jun 25

An interesting variant of Solarized that feels more uniform in places. The idea of custom background colors, and tweaking things following OKLab, is quite interesting.

by bal4e 7 months ago

02 May 25

A fun read describing an important (and seemingly inherent) difficulty of compiler optimization. E-graphs get around this, but IIRC are significantly slower.

by bal4e 9 months ago saved 3 times

30 Apr 25

A really interesting discussion of array-oriented compilation architectures. Tries to answer the same sorts of questions I’ve been asking myself about making compilers faster – although I think I come to different conclusions right now.

by bal4e 9 months ago

21 Apr 25

For me, fills a hole between APL (high-performance CPU/GPU array manipulation) and Rust (strong type checking). Super interesting stuff.

by bal4e 9 months ago saved 2 times

20 Apr 25

Interesting concept, and they seem to have a good number of integrations already. It was a bit hard to find the actual documentation for how it works, but it otherwise looks cool.

by bal4e 9 months ago saved 3 times

Amazing dissertation by Aaron Wen-yao Hsu, demonstrating a novel memory layout for ASTs and advocating for bottom-up traversal patterns. The fact that the compiler is just 17 lines of APL (which I can’t read in the slightest) is even cooler.

by bal4e 9 months ago

I’ve been looking for a good replacement to SSA form for mid-level and low-level optimisations. This feels like the right direction forward, but I need to try it myself before I’m convinced.

by bal4e 9 months ago

Discussion of super-optimization based on equality graphs and finding equivalent expressions. Contrast with https://egraphs-good.github.io/.

by bal4e 9 months ago saved 2 times

Interesting study of vectorizing the tokenization of a complex language.

by bal4e 9 months ago

12 Apr 25

Lovely visual summaries of how prefetching works on modern Intel chips. I would guess that older chips follow similar patterns. Great for designing data structures and optimizing memory traversal.

by bal4e 10 months ago saved 2 times

I’ve thought about vectorized sorting for a while, but I didn’t know that bitonic sorts can be implemented efficiently on SIMD registers. This is an interesting approach.

by bal4e 10 months ago