This article tells part of the story of New World Computing. Some passions are lifelong, but many others fade away over the course of a life, to be replaced by others. Not long after Jon Van Caneghem, the founder of New World Computing, sold his company to 3DO, it started to become obvious to…

Silence is a Commons by Ivan Illich Computers are doing to communication what fences did to pastures and cars did to streets. by Ivan Illich Minna-san, gladly I accept the honour of addressing this forum on Science and Man. The theme that Mr. Tsuru proposes, "The Computer-Managed Society," sounds an…

Achieving polymorphism via dynamic dispatch in Zig Unlike many languages that offer interface or virtual constructs, Zig has no built-in notion of interfaces. This reflects Zig’s commitment to simplicity and performance. That doesn’t mean polymorphism is off the table. In fact Zig has the tools to…

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…