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Everyone’s heard of how awesome Jane Street is. Fewer people have heard about the times something stupid nearly put it out of business and it was saved by grit and dumb luck. I was on the systems team for some of those. Jane Street didn’t do titles, and we on...

Replacing Git is in the news, so here’s a story from my time on Google’s source tools team 10 years ago. The #1 question: why does Google use an awful Perforce clone for the monorepo instead of Git? I met people across half the planet to find out. It’s not...

I posted this on the OCaml forum: OCaml Compiler Implemented in C++: It’s Not Just Faster—It Also Increases Trust. The code is at github.com/mbacarella/cxx-ocaml. Some excerpts follow; the full post, install instructions, more detailed benchmarks and the discussion are over there. You’re absolutely right to be skeptical of your compiler...

Every now and then I think of this guy that used to post solutions to the weekly Project Euler problems first. In assembler. Are they a madman, or is someone working at that tier of genius just so good they don’t need to use crutches like Python or C or...

Introduction The other day I came across some code that passes a function to std::sort. Though sort will let you call it with a std::function, there was an admonishment to use the function pointer version of sort instead. Using std::function is almost 4x slower for a trivial float comparison. What’s...

Introduction I conducted a static analysis of DeepSeek, a Chinese LLM chatbot, using version 1.8.0 from the Google Play Store. The goal was to identify potential security and privacy issues. I’ve written about DeepSeek previously here. Additional security and privacy concerns about DeepSeek have been raised. See also this analysis...

The release of the DeepSeek-r1 model by the Chinese AI lab DeepSeek, along with its availability on the App Store, marks a pivotal moment in the AI arms race between the US and China. This development underscores the intensifying competition in AI advancements between these two global powers. A lot...

One code of conduct professionals follow is “The New York Times Test”: you must never put anything in writing that you could be embarrassed to see printed on the front page of the New York Times. The risk is, if your company or business is ever in the news, and...

The OCaml ctypes library along with new support for ctypes stanzas in the dune build system make it a snap to bind C libraries. In this article, we will walk through how to prepare your project to use an external C library. But first, I’d like to try to convince...

It was the year 2003. I was sitting at the FTC office, with some other open source activists, testifying that Microsoft was in violation of its 1995 consent decree. Microsoft, through illegal monopolistic bundling deals, had been forcing laptop manufacturers to sell customers a license for Windows whether they wanted...