Superoptimizing an FPU Emulator(purplesyringa.moe)

39 points by dverlaeckt80 10 days ago | 6 comments

Blog post on using superoptimization to find an optimal instruction sequence for a floating-point emulator function returning a float's lowest set bit.

Vectorized CLZ and CTZ(purplesyringa.moe)

47 points by zX41ZdbW 15 days ago | 5 comments

Blog post on purplesyringa explaining how to implement vectorized count-leading-zeros and count-trailing-zeros using floating-point tricks.

WASM is not quite a stack machine(purplesyringa.moe)

142 points by signa11 6 months ago | 43 comments

WebP: The WebPage Compression Format(purplesyringa.moe)

511 points by Kubuxu 2 years ago | 185 comments

Blog post describing a trick to compress a website's HTML by encoding it into a lossless WebP image and decoding it in the browser, compared with gzip and Brotli.

Faster practical modular inversion(purplesyringa.moe)

50 points by todsacerdoti 10 months ago | 3 comments

Simplest Hash Functions(purplesyringa.moe)

44 points by ibobev 6 months ago | 39 comments

The Intel 8087 chip: floating-point addition and subtraction(righto.com)

102 points by pwg 8 days ago | 33 comments

Ken Shirriff blog post examining the Intel 8087 coprocessor's microcode and circuitry for floating-point addition and subtraction, including special cases.

Why fastDOOM is fast(fabiensanglard.net)

638 points by wicket 1 year ago | 201 comments

Fabien Sanglard's blog post explaining the optimizations that make FastDOOM, a DOS port of Doom, run faster on 486-era PCs like the IBM PS/1.

Things I learned while writing an x86 emulator (2013)(timdbg.com)

329 points by fanf2 2 years ago | 114 comments

Blog post by a former WinDbg developer describing odd x86/amd64 trivia learned while writing the CPU emulator for Microsoft's Time Travel Debugging.

Beating Google's kernelCTF PoW using AVX512(anemato.de)

320 points by anematode 1 year ago | 92 comments

Blog post describing how the author used AVX512IFMA to speed up Google's kernelCTF proof-of-work and win a $51k exploit submission race.

The seven programming ur-languages (2021)(madhadron.com)

320 points by surprisetalk 3 years ago | 167 comments

An essay on the madhadron blog arguing that programming languages descend from seven fundamental 'ur-languages' that learners should explore, rather than near-identical mainstream ones.

What Is PID 0?(blog.dave.tf)

344 points by todsacerdoti 2 years ago | 56 comments

Blog post by David Anderson explaining what PID 0 is in Unix/Linux, why it is hidden from userspace, and its role in booting and idle scheduling.