thoughts...

Advanced Go Concurrency Patterns

irrlab — Fri, 24 May 2013 11:27:02 +0000

“At Google I/O a year ago Rob Pike presented Go Concurrency Patterns, an introduction to Go’s concurrency model. Last week, at I/O 2013, Go team member Sameer Ajmani continued the story with Advanced Go Concurrency Patterns, an in-depth look at a real concurrent programming problem. The talk shows how to detect and avoid deadlocks and race conditions, and demonstrates the implementation of deadlines, cancellation, and more. For those who want to take their Go programming to the next level, this is a must-see…”

http://blog.golang.org/2013/05/advanced-go-concurrency-patterns.html

Lua versus Javascript: Why do we need multiple languages?

irrlab — Thu, 23 May 2013 14:15:51 +0000

Lua versus Javascript

Call me maybe: MongoDB

irrlab — Wed, 22 May 2013 17:51:46 +0000

“MongoDB is a document-oriented database with a similar distribution design to Redis. In a replica set, there exists a single writable primary node which accepts writes, and asynchronously replicates those writes as an oplog to N secondaries. However, there are a few key differences…”

http://aphyr.com/posts/284-call-me-maybe-mongodb

Go 1.1 performance improvements

irrlab — Wed, 22 May 2013 16:10:51 +0000

“This is the first in a series of articles analysing the performance improvements in the Go 1.1 release.

It has been reported (here, and here) that performance improvements of 30-40% are available simply by recompiling your code under Go 1.1. For linux/amd64 this holds true for a wide spectrum of benchmarks. For platforms like linux/386 and linux/arm the results are even more impressive, but I’m putting the cart before the horse…”

http://dave.cheney.net/2013/05/21/go-1-1-performance-improvements

http://dave.cheney.net/2013/05/25/go-11-performance-improvements-part-2

UnQLite – An Embeddable NoSQL Database Engine

irrlab — Wed, 22 May 2013 14:54:19 +0000

“UnQLite is a in-process software library which implements a self-contained, serverless, zero-configuration, transactional NoSQL database engine. UnQLite is a document store database similar to MongoDB, Redis, CouchDB etc. as well a standard Key/Value store similar to BerkeleyDB, LevelDB, etc...”

http://www.unqlite.org/

Converting a virtual machine from VirtualBox to KVM

irrlab — Tue, 21 May 2013 13:13:08 +0000

“Some people report better performance using KVM. I haven’t benchmarked KVM agains VirtualBox, but I found they both performed adequately on my AMD Athlon. VirtualBox is certainly the slicker of the two: if you run the free-as-in-beer guest extensions, desktop integration is fantastic. I will say I prefer the KVM pure CLI management interface. VirtualBox has notions of tracking virtual machines in a registry while in KVM you specify the hardware specs on invocation. The only thing that’s preserved on VM reboots is the hard drive. So converting a VM from VirtualBox to KVM really means converting the hard drive image…”

http://cheznick.net/main/content/converting-a-virtual-machine-from-virtualbox-to-kvm

LISP Prolog and Evolution

irrlab — Tue, 21 May 2013 12:19:58 +0000

“It was a provocative and humorous talk. David showed all the powerful features of LISP and said that the reason why LISP is not more adapted is that it is too powerful. Everybody laughed but it made me think. LISP was decades ahead of other languages, why did it not become a mainstream language?…”

http://blog.samibadawi.com/2013/05/lisp-prolog-and-evolution.html

A study on scripting language APIs

irrlab — Tue, 21 May 2013 11:27:11 +0000

A study on scripting language APIs

“Applications written in two programming languages, in order to optimize parts where performance is critical or to obtain extensibility through user-written scripts, are common-place nowadays. There are several ways to obtain this kind of interoperability; ideally, however, a language should provide a foreign language interface (FLI), allowing programmers to send and receive both data and function calls to code written in another language. This work discusses the main issues involving the design of APIs for integration of language environments within C applications. We present the main problems faced in the interaction between code executed in an environment with inherently dynamic characteristics such as a scripting language and C code. We compare approaches employed by five languages when handling communication between the data spaces of C and embedded runtime environments and the consequences of these approaches in memory management, as well as sharing of code between the C application and that from the scripting language. We illustrate the diferences of the APIs of those languages and their impact in the resulting code of a C application through a case study. Diferent scripting languages were embedded as plugins for a library, which on its turn exposes to client applications a generic scripting API. This way, the code of each plugin allows us to observe in a clear and isolated way the procedures adopted by each language for function calls, registration of C functions and conversion of data between the environments.”

Richard Dawkins – O Vírus da Fé

irrlab — Tue, 21 May 2013 11:07:01 +0000

Call me maybe: Redis & Reply to Aphyr attack to Sentinel

irrlab — Mon, 20 May 2013 16:29:30 +0000

“Redis is a fantastic data structure server, typically deployed as a shared heap. It provides fast access to strings, lists, sets, maps, and other structures with a simple text protocol. Since it runs on a single server, and that server is single-threaded, it offers linearizable consistency by default: all operations happen in a single, well-defined order. There’s also support for basic transactions, which are atomic and isolated from one another.

Because of this easy-to-understand consistency model, many users treat Redis as a message queue, lock service, session store, or even their primary database. Redis running on a single server is a CP system, so it is consistent for these purposes…”

http://aphyr.com/posts/283-call-me-maybe-redis

http://antirez.com/news/55