research!rsc

A birthday proof for Don Knuth

Diffing code coverage for passing and failing runs can identify suspicious code blocks.

Binary search over program code or execution to find why a new library or compiler causes a failure.

A detailed walkthrough of the xz attack shell script.

A detailed timeline of the xz open source attack, from 2021 to 2024.

The way Go changes, and how to improve it with telemetry.

The importance of testing, and twenty tips for writing good tests.

A remote talk at ACM SCORED 2023

Ken Thompson’s Turing award lecture, running in your browser.

The meaning of "undefined behavior" has changed significantly since its introduction in the 1980s.

Why we need coroutines for Go, and what they might look like.

Write programs, not simulations of programs.

Updating the transparent telemetry design to be opt-in.

Many examples of ways that transparent telemetry would help developers understand their software better.

Details about how transparent telemetry could work.

What would open-source-friendly telemetry look like?

Topic Index

The magic of using small samples to learn about large data sets.

A tour of Go’s four version control systems.

Stop blindly installing the latest version of all transitive dependencies.

Code review is the answer to this and many other problems.

Around two million.

What changes should we make to Go's memory model?

An introduction to programming language memory models.

An introduction to hardware memory models.

Topic Index

The rationale behind the Go modules design.

How do we increase user representation in the proposal process, and what does that mean?

How can we balance stability and experimentation?

How can we scale large discussions?

How can we identify and handle large changes better?

What would improve everyone’s understanding of the process?

What works about the Go proposal process? What doesn’t?

Topic Index

How an untrusted server can publish a verifiably append-only log.

An unexpected tree traversal ordering.

Download and run code from strangers on the internet. What could go wrong?

Why should Go understand package versions at all?

What is software engineering and what does Go mean by it?

What is the state of vgo?

What does it mean to add versioning to the go command?

How to specify what's in a module.

Consistent builds in versioned Go.

How do builds select which versions to use?

How do you deploy an incompatible change to an existing package?

We need to add package versioning to Go.

We need to add package versioning to Go.

Topic Index

Regular expression exponentials in another form.

What I would like to do for Go in 2017.

Programming language dogmatics.

Locked frees and freed locks.

Dependency hell is NP-complete

Modifying the OS X kernel binary to make user-level CPU profiling work

The internals of Google's pprof CPU Profiler (for C++ and Go)

A video introduction to Acme, the Plan 9 text editor

A video introduction to Go: interfaces, reflection, concurrency

How to make pictures with QR codes, part II

How to make pictures with QR codes, part I

Go ahead, call rand in your hash function.

Sorry about the RSS trouble.

Regular Expression Matching with a Trigram Index, or, How Google Code Search Worked

Straightforward printing of floating-point values.

Simplify equations with God

Matching well-formed XML (!) with a not-quite-regular expression

It's here!

When chip design meant drawing every wire by hand

Seeing the packets

Even if it smells that way.

A language I'm still waiting for

A real Turing machine!

Mind-bending implementation techniques

Did you think it was turtles?

Regular Expression Matching in the Wild

This one you can talk about.

The reasons to switch to UTF-8

How to break memory safety using race conditions

My variable naming philosophy

Why you can name any package math

How to make yacc print good syntax errors

The end of the style wars

Regular Expression Matching: The Virtual Machine Approach

Data-based programming

Musings about generics in Go

How interface values work in Go

An introduction to basic Go data structures

Back to blogging...

The dynamics of elections

Looking at the context that made it possible

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Disk storage that can heal itself

Like counting with one hand

Doug McIlroy’s rememberances

The Busy Beaver Problem

Is sorting hard because it is recursive?

An unusual but very useful data structure

A hashing technique that faded into history

... and why they're the same problem

Historical bitmaps

The locks on nuclear weapons

Elegant Haskell programs for computing power series

A look at early distributed systems

The pitfalls of mixing naming systems

How to make C look like ALGOL

The computational complexity of airline travel

A file system that was truly robust against failures

Some influential languages of the past.

My favorite paper that was never published

Someone had to do it.

Experience with some early computer viruses

An abuse of C

The only winning move is not to play.

Physicists at work

... well, let's leave it at that.

The perfect chess machine

When in doubt, use brute force.

A now-standard compiler optimization

The halting problem, in verse

A destructive, pointless violation of the rules

The canonical introduction

The most readable VM you'll ever see.

How to force Quicksort to run in quadratic time

Hello, world