Tag1 Consulting Blog

I do know this for sure: 'So it's not just "better", it's "Better" with a capital 'B'. Nothing else out there comes even close. The Linux dcache is simply in a class all its own.' -Linus Torvalds https://www.tag1consulting.com/blog/interview-linus-torvalds-linux-and… I do realize that the dcache is not a direct relation to the scheduler (but will certainly impact it), but I trust that performance enthusiasts will go to great lengths to extend Linux's top benchmarks in TPC and elsewhere. It has also not been widely reported that a) Oracle posted a top TPC-C score shortly after acquiring Sun, running on 11g/Solaris SPARC 10, and b) OceanBase has now beaten that by an order of magnitude. To see both the Oceanbase and Oracle 11g/Solaris scores, historical benchmarks must be enabled: https://www.tpc.org/tpcc/results/tpcc_results5.asp?print=false&ord…

In the era when system research is dying [1], the only saving graces are the Nix/Guix for OS management improvement and perhaps eBPF for OS performance enhancement. The Winix OS is a breath of fresh air in term of potential OS directions. Like they have always said, timing is everything and probably this is the project similar to Apple's Newton project that have many goods in it but just born several years too early. Winix targets RISC architecture and with RISC-V taking off exponentially at the very moment, having RISC biased OS will definitely provide edges and advantages for the platform, similar to x86 quirks to Linux, and Linux taking advantages when x86-32 and x86-64 took off. This year when Linus was asked for the best Linux achievement compared to other OS, Linus has pointed out the innovative Linux based lock-free filesystem [2]. Winix has built-in innovative POSIX compatible in-memory file-system (IMFS) by default. Imagine an OS with IMFS that's also natively compatible with the increasingly popular Arrow and TileDB in-memory format. With Terabyte (TB) RAM computers becoming the norm in the near future this can easily be the fastest OS with the state-of-the-art filesystem around. Fuschia is another latest OS on-the-block but by focusing on the mobile rather than desktop it will probably optimized for the former, unlike Winix. [1]https://tianyin.github.io/misc/irrelevant.pdf [2]https://www.tag1consulting.com/blog/interview-linus-torvalds-linux-and…

How does mg compare with MicroEMACS (famously used by Linus Torvalds [1])? [1] https://www.tag1consulting.com/blog/interview-linus-torvalds-linux-and…

The article talks about Torvalds disliking CVS and Subversion but never making himself clear about the reasons, and later suggests that the most important "not fully articulated" reason was speed. But I think a more important reason for him was that he felt that CVS and SVN implicitly came with a development model where a small group of people has official commit privileges, while he very strongly wants a model without that. See for example what he says here: https://www.tag1consulting.com/blog/interview-linus-torvalds-linux-and… (search for "commit bit").

He doesn't. Linus uses MicroEMACS [0], which is an entirely different editor that uses emacs bindings. It's not the lisp vm that incidentally happens to edit code that GNU Emacs is. Or, as he puts it [1]: > I use this abomination called "micro-emacs", which has absolutely nothing to do with GNU emacs except that some of the key bindings are similar. [0]: https://github.com/torvalds/uemacs [1]: https://www.tag1consulting.com/blog/interview-linus-torvalds-linux-and…

He said he might switch to nano. It's not currently his editor of choice (unless there's something more recent). If I recall correctly he has been using uEmacs/PK (https://github.com/torvalds/uemacs). > I really need to switch over to something that is actually maintained and does utf-8 properly. Probably 'nano'. https://www.tag1consulting.com/blog/interview-linus-torvalds-linux-and…

There are a few of those frameworks. The first one that comes to mind is YJS here is a getting started[1]. 1. https://www.tag1consulting.com/blog/deep-dive-real-time-collaborative-…

Part 1: https://www.tag1consulting.com/blog/interview-linus-torvalds-linux-and… Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26969595

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe this is the interview you are referring to https://www.tag1consulting.com/blog/interview-linus-torvalds-linux-and… in case anyone was curious like I was.

Tag1 Consulting has been working on a locust-inspired implementation in Rust for some time now, called Goose [1]. They blog about their work regularly.[2] Has anyone given it a try? I'm not affiliated with them but appreciate the open source effort. [1] https://github.com/tag1consulting/goose [2] https://www.tag1consulting.com/blog/real-life-goose-load-testing

Googling "myisam vs innodb" gives a lot of pretty informative results, including (http://tag1consulting.com/MySQL_Engines_MyISAM_vs_InnoDB). The big turn-off for me with MyISAM is that I can run a script to create some tables and setup for FK dependancies, and it will happily run it without errors, but won't enforce the constraints I created. Terrible behavior. I need foreign keys, transactions, row locking, etc... Of course I now happily use PostgreSQL:)

Ah, yes, my mistake, he was only thinking of switching to nano: > And it's all done in a traditional terminal, although I don't use 'vi'. I use this abomination called "micro-emacs", which has absolutely nothing to do with GNU emacs except that some of the key bindings are similar. I got used to it at the University of Helsinki when I was a wee lad, and I've not been able to wean myself from it, although I suspect I will have to soon enough. I hacked up (a very limited) utf-8 support for it a few years ago, but it's really showing its age, and showing all the signs of having been written in the 80's and the version I use was a fork that hasn't been maintained since the mid 90's. > University of Helsinki used it because it worked on DOS, VAX/VMS and Unix, which is why I got introduced to it. And now my fingers are hardcoded for it. I really need to switch over to something that is actually maintained and does utf-8 properly. Probably 'nano'. But my hacked-up piece of historical garbage works just barely well enough that I've never been really forced to teach my old fingers new tricks. https://www.tag1consulting.com/blog/interview-linus-torvalds-linux-and…

Linus Torvalds talks about taste in https://www.tag1consulting.com/blog/interview-linus-torvalds-linux-and… I did maintain Git for a few months, and the thing that made me ask Junio if he wanted to be the maintainer is that very-hard-to-describe notion of "good taste". I don't really have a better description for it: programming is about solving technical problems, but how you solve them, and how you think about them is important too, and it's one of those things you start to recognize over time: certain people have that "good taste" thing and pick the "right" solution. I don't want to claim that programming is an art, because it really is mostly just about "good engineering". I'm a big believer in Thomas Edison's "one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration" mantra: it's almost all about the little details and the everyday grunt-work. But there is that occasional "inspiration" part, that "good taste" thing that is about more than just solving some problem - solving it cleanly and nicely and yes, even beautifully. And Junio had that "good taste". And every time Git comes up, I try to remember to really make it very very clear: I may have started and designed the core ideas in Git, but I often get too much credit for that part. It's been 15+ years, and I was really only involved with Git in that first year. Junio has been an exemplary maintainer, and he's the one who has made Git what it is today. Btw, this whole "good taste" thing and…