6 pages tagged with "intro"

For the longest time, I thought that "sealed trait" in Rust was a singular concept implementable in one specific way. To prevent downstream crates from implementing your traits, you make the traits sealed — done, end of story. I was wrong! It turns out there are multiple ways to seal traits, forming a pleasant spectrum of options:

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Undefined behavior (UB) is a tricky concept in programming languages and compilers. Over the many years I've been an industry mentor for MIT's 6.172 Performance Engineering course, An excellent class that I highly recommend. It's very thorough and hands-on, at the expense of also requiring a lot of… read more

A beginner-friendly introduction to compilers: follow along as we build a compiler from scratch, or fork the code on GitHub and add your own optimizations too! In this episode: value numbering helps track how values are used in the program. Last time on Compiler Adventures, we implemented constant p… read more

A beginner-friendly introduction to compilers: follow along as we build a compiler from scratch, or fork the code on GitHub and add your own optimizations too! In this episode: propagating constant values to eliminate more instructions. Last time on Compiler Adventures, we wrote an optimization that… read more

A beginner-friendly introduction to compilers: follow along as we build a compiler from scratch, or fork the code on GitHub and add your own optimizations too! In this episode: eliminating no-op instructions. What part of computer science feels most like arcane magic? I'd say compilers. "The magical… read more

Distributed systems courses frequently introduce the Paxos and two-phase commit (2PC) protocols in quick succession. On one hand, this is a reasonable educational choice, as Paxos and 2PC are both examples of consensus algorithms used in the real world. On the other, it leads many students toward th… read more