Core Dumped

This makes me wonder if I should be writing on substack. I currently use a static site generator and host with netlify[1]. This is great because it is simple and I have complete control over the site. But at the same time I can’t see when people visit my site and there is no comment section. I rely or external forums like HN, lobsters, and Reddit to have a discussion. And I have no way of knowing when my content gets shared because I can’t see the traffic. But my purpose of writing is the same as the authors, to find like minded people and have a discussion with them. It’s kind of cure for intellectual loneliness. [1] https://coredumped.dev/

emacs still does this IIUC. The beating heart of the emacs edit model is a "gap buffer" at the cursor. There's a neat compare-and-contrast someone did awhile back on the gap buffer approach vs. the other approach often taken for code IDEs ("ropes"). The tl;dr is that gap buffers are actually really performant for a lot of cases except for having to edit at a lot of randomly-chosen cursor points far apart from each other (but how often is that your use case?). https://coredumped.dev/2023/08/09/text-showdown-gap-buffers-vs-ropes/

gap buffer performs surprisingly well vs rope https://coredumped.dev/2023/08/09/text-showdown-gap-buffers-vs-ropes/

This is a pet interest of mine for decades. Did you run any of this under perf and check where the time is going? This may be too simple (too regular) to show it, but the biggest issue with all of these is that the branch predictor doesn't have enough context to make good predictions and you end up mispredicting a lot. This paper https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~matz/dissertation/matzDissertation-latex2h… (found the reference in https://coredumped.dev/2021/10/21/building-an-emacs-lisp-vm-in-rust) suggests an interesting option which isn't portable, but a lot less work than a full JIT: generate just call and conditional branches. This was enough for them to basically fix all the branch mispredictions. I have yet to try it, but maybe someone else will feel inspired. The pain I ran into when trying is that a naively mapp'ed region will be very far from the code you are trying to call and you won't be able to use simple instructions. The fix is to try to allocate it explicitly closer. PS: Another technique I have used in Rust (idea was from cloudflare) is to generate closures and have each closure tail call the next. It'll end up very similar to your continuation passing, but at least on my benchmarks it was _slightly_ worse than the naive dispatch.