The Curious Engineer

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Pointers Gone Wild

pointersgonewild.com

CompilersRustPerformance / optimizationAI / ML

Posts
178 from 27 Aug 2011 to 16 Sep 2026
Posting
monthly (12 in the last year)
Kind
personal blog
Feed
https://pointersgonewild.com/rss.xml

2026 11

  1. I'm Looking for My Next Role
  2. Plush's New Register-Based Interpreter Is Insanely Fast
  3. Replacing a Rust Enum with a 64-bit Word Made My Interpreter 17% Faster
  4. Speeding Up the Plush Garbage Collector
  5. Building Groovie, an Advanced Web-Based Drum Machine / Beat Sequencer
  6. The Hard Part Isn't Technical
  7. I Want to Build a Sandboxed, Cross-Platform Software Distribution System
  8. Building a Clang Backend and Porting Doom to my Custom Bytecode VM
  9. The AI Safety Paradox
  10. Dependencies are a Liability
  11. A Recursive Algorithm to Render Signed Distance Fields

2025 8

  1. Building a Copying GC for the Plush Programming Language
  2. Optimizing the Plush Interpreter for Faster Raytracing
  3. Out-Fibbing CPython with the Plush Interpreter
  4. Creating a Toy Programming Language with Actor-Based Parallelism
  5. AI Safety in the Presence of Multiple ASI Systems
  6. Yes, We Do Want Humanoid Robots
  7. My Low-Tech Attempt to Automate Spellchecking
  8. So I Rolled My Own Static Site Generator

2024 2

  1. The Alternative Implementation Problem
  2. The Race to Make Humans Obsolete

2023 5

  1. Human-Scale vs Asymmetric Social Media
  2. Preparing UVM for 3D Graphics
  3. Software Bugs That Cause Real-World Harm
  4. Memory, Pages, mmap, and Linear Address Spaces
  5. Building a Minimalistic Virtual Machine

2022 7

  1. Typed vs Untyped Virtual Machines
  2. Minimalism in Programming Language Design
  3. Democracy, Dictatorships and Access to Information
  4. NoiseCraft Project Update
  5. Code that Doesn't Rot
  6. The Internet Changed My Life
  7. What's Could You Use Tesla Bot For?

2021 4

  1. NoiseCraft: a Browser-Based Visual Programming Language for Sound & Music
  2. YJIT: Building a New JIT Compiler Inside CRuby
  3. Investing is a Social Phenomenon
  4. On Insurmountable Technical Obstacles

2020 3

  1. Combatting Pessimism: 3 Keys to Innovation
  2. The Need for Stable Foundations in Software Development
  3. Maybe Planets are Overrated?

2019 6

  1. It's Been Done Before
  2. They Might Never Tell You It's Broken
  3. Balancing Fun, Stress and Profit
  4. Zupiter: a Web-Based Modular Synthesizer
  5. The End of Online Anonymity
  6. MiniWorld: A VizDoom Alternative for OpenAI Gym

2018 5

  1. A Small Dose of Optimism
  2. Building a Simple Self-Driving Car Simulator
  3. (Spread)sheet Music: Making a Simple Music Sequencer using CSV Spreadsheets
  4. Minimalism in Programming
  5. My new Job in RL & Robotics Research

2017 5

  1. We All Live in a Bubble
  2. The AI Risk Isn't What You Think
  3. Zeta's JITterpreter
  4. ZetaVM, my new compiler project
  5. Technodiversity

2016 10

  1. The Brain's Registers
  2. Method Call Syntax in a JS-like Language
  3. So, I've been using gedit this whole time
  4. My Experience with the ESP8266 - Making an LED Strip I can Control from my Shell
  5. Silicon Valley, Six Months Later
  6. Optimizing Ray Marching through Partial Evaluation
  7. Sense from Chaos - Crossing the Semantic Gap
  8. Moving to the Valley
  9. Building a Small-Scale Prototype
  10. Exercise, Depression and the Energy Hypothesis

2015 21

  1. Musings on AOT, JIT and Language Design
  2. Have Static Languages Won?
  3. Why I Chose Industry Over a Postdoc
  4. The Robotic Revolution
  5. There's Too Many Programming Languages!
  6. Basic Block Versioning - My Best Result Yet
  7. All Hope is Not Lost for Flying Cars
  8. Why You Should be a Little Scared of Machine Learning
  9. What Killed Smalltalk?
  10. JavaScript is the C++ of the Web
  11. All Possible Thoughts
  12. Feels like Censorship
  13. Presented at ECOOP
  14. Typed Shapes Paper Submitted
  15. Maybe we ought to have Numerical Coprocessors?
  16. The AI Breakthrough that Won't Happen
  17. The Smart Web is Coming
  18. The Problem with HTML
  19. What is Intelligence?
  20. Basic Block Versioning - Published At Last!
  21. My Thesis: A Clearer Picture

2014 18

  1. Visit to Northeastern University
  2. The Fastest For-In Loops in the Whole Wide Web
  3. Pushing Higgs to the Limit
  4. Circumventing the D Garbage Collector
  5. Audiobooks are Awesome
  6. Faster than V8 *
  7. Making Waves: D's GC Problem Followup
  8. D's Garbage Collector Problem
  9. Dogfooding Higgs with the Turing Turtle
  10. My Paper was Rejected Again
  11. The Constness Problem
  12. News of Higgs
  13. Positive Results for Higgs
  14. How I Hacked my Stationary Bike and Voided its Warranty
  15. Higgs: Upcoming Talks & New Contributions
  16. Accelerating Real-Time Path Tracing
  17. Contribute to the Higgs JS Compiler
  18. Tile-Based Image Compression

2013 22

  1. The Incremental JIT Lives
  2. Alan Turing: The Enigma - A Book Review
  3. The Electric Mirror
  4. Higgs: the First JIT Compiler of its Kind
  5. übertechnoshoes
  6. Static Typing may not Scale
  7. Down the Rabbit Hole that is Inlining
  8. Higgs: Rise of the SSA JIT
  9. Sometimes a datum is just a datum
  10. Programming without Text Files
  11. On Holistic Programming Languages
  12. How I miss you, dear SSA
  13. Inlining in Higgs
  14. PSA: Caffeine is a Drug
  15. Turing Drawings Followup
  16. Presented at DConf 2013
  17. Progress on the Higgs JIT
  18. A Simple JIT Compiler
  19. Back from Silicon Valley
  20. Visiting Mozilla
  21. Higgs has a Garbage Collector
  22. More Fun with Turing Machines

2012 32

  1. Turing Drawings
  2. Higgs has Exceptions
  3. Sky Blue
  4. Higgs: My New Tracing JIT for JavaScript
  5. Static vs Dynamic: Why not Both?
  6. Debugging by the Seat of the Pants
  7. Dynamically Adjusting LCD Brightness with Ambient Light
  8. Some Glues Don't Mix with Electronics
  9. The AVR Alarm Clock is Complete
  10. Short Update on toyCPU
  11. toyCPU Project Update
  12. Designing a toy CPU
  13. A Radical Introduction to Programming
  14. An Inexpensive Robot Platform
  15. Why Do Most New Languages Fail?
  16. Loebner Contest makes Turing Roll in his Grave
  17. We Should be Sequencing the DNA of Endangered Species
  18. MusicToy - Music Made Simple
  19. The Indirection Problem
  20. Why LISP Never Took Off
  21. Inefficient Numerical Operators
  22. Teaching Computers about Music
  23. Game Development: Toying with CSG and WebGL
  24. Are Variadic Functions Necessary?
  25. Stop Hating on C!
  26. Venturing into Electronic Music
  27. Exporting MIDI Files using Data URIs
  28. Try my Web App: Melodique, a Procedural Melodic Phrase Generator
  29. Algorithms Making Music
  30. About Tachyon's Garbage Collector
  31. Two HDTVs for my Media PC
  32. Tachyon's Design Principles

2011 19

  1. Tachyon has a Garbage Collector!
  2. Type Analysis for JavaScript
  3. Good News for JavaScript! Bad News for Me...
  4. Progress on the Überclock
  5. Metaprogramming for JavaScript
  6. What I'd like to Know about JavaScript Programs
  7. Code Compactness and Optimization Levels
  8. Presented at DLS 2011
  9. Toying with Microcontrollers Part Deux
  10. Optimizing Global Value Numbering
  11. What's Next for Tachyon
  12. Toying with AVR Microcontrollers
  13. New x86 Backend and... JavaScript Macros?
  14. My Masters Research: Just-In-Time Specialization
  15. Just Passed my Predoctoral Exam
  16. Predoctoral Exam
  17. Artificial Life in your Web Browser!
  18. The Tachyon JavaScript Compiler
  19. Hello world!