Clément Grégoire

Why I Prefer Exceptions to Error Values CedarDB is a database system that delivers unmatched performance for transactions and analytics, from small writes to handling billions of rows. Built on cutting-edge research to power today’s tools a...

I've long been opposed to exceptions for reasons, but I have to admit there are use cases.
I don't really agree with most of what is said in the article, but it does make some points.

cedardb.com/blog/excepti...

Dear frontend developers:

Stop fucking using buttons instead of links! I want to be able to copy, open in new tab,... Well, have links be links and not buttons.

Thanks.

Spinning around: Please don't! - siliceum Embark on a journey about why you should sometimes trust your OS more than yourself.

Ever wrote spin-locks or had to debug them?
I have, and I got tired of seeing (and writing) crappy ones, so I did a real investigation this time.

Spoiler: trust your OS.

siliceum.com/en/blog/post...

Can we all agree that OpenSSL sucks by requiring perl to build in 2026?
I'm not even asking for CMake support, just no stupid dependencies!

Cup arrived right before Christmas, thanks @matt.godbolt.org

It's getting harder and harder to optimize for new CPUs, we now have NUMA on consumer CPUs...

No Graphics API — Sebastian Aaltonen Graphics APIs and shader languages have significantly increased in complexity over the past decade. It’s time to start discussing how to strip down the abstractions to simplify development, improve pe...

My "No Graphics API" blog post is live! Please repost :)
www.sebastianaaltonen.com/blog/no-grap...

I spend 1.5 years doing this. Full rewrite last summer and another partial rewrite last month. As Hemingway said: "First draft of everything is always shit".

Did I mention I hate the webdev ecosystem ?

Luckily the @vite.dev's team got it right in rollup... so it's time for us to switch to rollup and dump esbuild.

Still, web dev sucks.

As if it was not already wasteful for Objects imports (this is only really needed for non-Object types)...

It creates one such object PER file doing any import, even if you only need 1 export from the original !

Now let's say you have a SDK with ~780 exports & 171files...
That's 120000 functions!

Today a new episode of "Web sucks"!

When handling import of an external library, ESBuild generates some kind of import table for the whole library.
But since it needs to mimick ESM modules, it creates the "exports" object using Getters instead of properties.

Movie you’ve watched more than six times with a gif. Hard mode: no Stars (Wars nor Trek), LOTR, or Marvel, Disney Animated or Pixar.

Nice to finally see the busy/wait/idle for gpu queues, bubbling was a major issue for a previous client of mine (mitigated by fixing the command list merging, I think it's now OK upstream)

Depends on your OS, on Linux it's easy, on windows you need to juggle with power plans (I've got an internal tool for that, I need to release someday...)

Yep, same as the CPU and other things.
Though it still matters to sometimes profile without stabilizing your machine as it's the "end-user experience", and things such as power change latency can actually kill the perf of your app.
But 90%of the time please do stabilize your machine.

Mine started by finding yet another bad spinlock in a widely used library.

If you do try it out or already use it I'd be interested in the results!

Unlocking the secrets of ETW: Stack Caching Unlocking the secrets of ETW: Stack Caching. GitHub Gist: instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

I'm afraid it's less exciting than it sound, it's basicly just caching!
I've seen some reports (don't remember where exactly) that it does slow down the collection somehow (I didn't verify)

gist.github.com/Zhentar/7f3f...

Interesting! I did a similar experiment in the past for another profiler but never finished it.
Note you could even pack your pages by storing bidepth and numelements in the upper 12bits of your data pointers :)

Well, there is actually an option to compress callstacks, but depending on your workload it might not save much space. (I have a link to something related somewhere, if you're interested)

Even the minigames shipped on the minidiscs were kind of good for the time

"But look at that horrible microsoftism declspec(dllexport), it's so annoying and hard to understand with those macros!" - some1 in the 90s
"Everything should be visible cause code is open and it aligns with my political views" - Another one, from GNU.
"This is dumb" - the one banned from GNU

And then they openly blame devs for poor perfs.. . I blame them for poor tooling and bad optimizations.

So UE5 has a tool that generates perf reports, with a whole Metadata generation thing (in XML) that allows to customize reports.

But it still displays averages for timings everywhere.

Oh, and their perf bench tool is implemented using 3layers of different technologies.

Finally took the time to buy a licence for Fork. Truly the best UI for git, as it's the only one that never disappointed me. It's only missing Linux support but otherwise well worth its price.
@fork_dev@mastodon.social

UE5 disk size is insane, you need at least 2TB to be safe for a single small/mid-size project.

Just saw this has been fixed, thanks a lot, for that and the Rss feeds!

ETW Events and thread names - siliceum Thread names are one of the most crucial information one can get system activity. However Windows ETW does not make it easy to retrieve!

New blog post about my journey into the ETW depths, I had long wanted to look into it, now I'm starting to regret it (just a bit).
But this is great if you want to write your own tools for profiling!

www.siliceum.com/en/blog/post...

Ahah, if it's too much work don't bother 😉

Nice!
Would it be possible to add a RSS feed to your blog? Helps me keep track of new posts!