In the world of Unix-like operating systems, processes and file handling are fundamental concepts that every system programmer should understand. Today, we’re going to explore an interesting intersection of these two concepts: what happens to open file descriptors when a process forks? This topic…

Series An Intro to DeepSeek’s Distributed File System A Reality Check on DeepSeek’s Distributed File System Benchmarks How should we analyze 3FS? In my previous post, I introduced DeepSeek’s 3FS distributed file system – exploring its architecture, components, and the CRAQ protocol that provides its…

June 08, 2025 Author: Andrew Kelley Now, when you target x86_64, by default, Zig will use its own x86 backend rather than using LLVM to lower a bitcode file to an object file. The default is not changed on Windows yet, because more COFF linker work needs to be done first. The x86 backend is now…

Introduction Quadratic funding has received a lot of attention recently as a mechanism for funding public goods—especially in the cryptocurrency space. QF is appealing because it is theoretically optimal under certain assumptions1. The problem is that these assumptions don’t ever hold in reality.…

The Joy (and pain) of Emacs I use emacs, which might be thought of as a thermonuclear word processor. —Neal Stephenson, In the Beginning was the Command Line Some years ago, I went through a phase that I imagine many software developers go through at least once in their careers—a period of intense…