performance

All articles tagged with "performance"

7 Articles

Programming Languages

Rob Pike's Programming Rules Are Still Right

In 1989, Rob Pike — who would later co-create Go, UTF-8, and Plan 9 — wrote down five rules of programming. They're short enough to fit on an index card and...

James WhitfieldJames Whitfield9 min read
Programming Languages

CPU Branch Prediction: Your Code's Hidden Bottleneck

There's a famous Stack Overflow answer that's been viewed over 3 million times. The question: why is processing a sorted array faster than processing an...

James WhitfieldJames Whitfield10 min read
Web Development

Scroll Fade Is a UX Antipattern and You Should Stop Using It

You've seen it on every marketing site, SaaS landing page, and portfolio built in the last five years. You scroll down the page and content fades in from...

Marcus RodriguezMarcus Rodriguez7 min read
Emerging Tech

GPU-Accelerated Terminals: TTYs to Glyph Atlases

In 1978, Digital Equipment Corporation shipped the VT100. It was a piece of furniture — a CRT in a beige enclosure, wired to a minicomputer via serial cable....

James WhitfieldJames Whitfield10 min read
Programming Languages

Python's JIT Compiler Is Finally Happening

Python has been 'too slow' for as long as Python has existed. The standard response from the Python community — 'use C extensions for the hot loops' — has...

James WhitfieldJames Whitfield9 min read
Web Development

When WebAssembly Isn't Faster Than JavaScript

Last month I spent a Saturday rewriting a Rust-to-WASM image metadata parser in TypeScript. The WASM version had been in production for eight months. It worked...

Marcus RodriguezMarcus Rodriguez11 min read
Programming Languages

Why jemalloc Matters: Memory Allocation at Scale

Every time your program calls malloc(), something has to decide which chunk of virtual memory to hand back. This decision — trivial for a small program —...

James WhitfieldJames Whitfield9 min read