And

  It is now the only software in the world still written in C89.

Hilarious.

But wait, there's more!

    > Predictive SELECT Statements:
    > Added the PRECOGNITION keyword.
    > SELECT * FROM sales WHERE date = 'tomorrow' now returns data with 99.4% accuracy by leveraging the built-in 4kB inference engine. The library size has increased by 12 bytes to accommodate this feature.

12 bytes really sounds like something that the lead dev would write!

Similarly in regular SQL systems, the same is achieved by fsyncing to WAL.

> Scalability is always going to be poor when writers attempt to modify the same object, no matter the solution you implement.

MVCC.

Well, yes, that's one way of avoiding mutating the same object of course.

Technically it is not because eventually it will be mutated, and that's one way of achieving the scalability in multiple writers scenario.

Pretty cool. For it to scale they are building their own deterministic hypervisor too [0], but also a new distributed database to support their workloads more efficiently [1].

[0] https://antithesis.com/blog/deterministic_hypervisor

[1] https://antithesis.com/blog/2025/testing_pangolin

Yeah, I think so too now that I read some documentation about it. It appears that the main issue with the spinlock pattern is that it inhibits "a severe performance penalty when exiting the [spinlock] loop because it [CPU] detects a possible memory order violation." [0].

~10 years ago, on Haswell, it took ~9 cycles to retire, and from Skylake onward, with some exceptions, it takes a magnitude more - ~140 cycles.

These numbers alone suggests that it really messes up hard with the CPU pipeline, perhaps BP (?) or speculative execution (?) or both (?) such that it will basically force the CPU to flush the whole pipeline. This is at least how I read this. I will remember this instruction as "damage control" instruction from now on.

[0] https://www.felixcloutier.com/x86/pause

Some things from the article are debatable for sure, and some are maybe missing like the one you mention with PAUSE instruction, which I also have not been aware of, but generally speaking I thought it was a really good content. Lean system engineering skills applied to real world problems. I especially appreciated the examples of large-scale infra codebases doing it in practice.

> There is a reason default lock implementations from OS don't spin even a little bit.

glibc pthread mutex uses a user-space spinlock to mitigate the syscall cost for uncontended cases.

WDYM? Vector is an abstraction over dynamically sized arrays so sure it does use heap to store its elements.

I think usefulcat interpreted "std::vector<int> allocated and freed on the stack" as creating a default std::vector<int> and then destroying it without pushing elements to it. That's what their godbolt link shows, at least, though to be fair MSVC seems to match the described GCC/Clang behavior these days.

Codegen from Matlab/Simulink/whatever is good for proof of concept design. It largely helps engineers who are not very good with coding to hypothesize about different algorithmic approaches. Engineers who actually implement that algorithm in a system that will be deployed are coming from a different group with different domain expertise.

You do realize that there's a handful of literally the same people here on HN continuously evangelizing one technology by constantly dissing on the other? Because of the pervasiveness of such accounts/comments it invites other people, myself included, to counter-argue because most of the time the reality they're trying to portray is misrepresented or many times simply wrong. This is harmful and obviously invites for a flame war so how is that not by the same principle you applied to above account a guideline breach too?

We act on what we see, and we see what people make us aware of via flags and emails.

Comments like yours are difficult because they’re not actionable or able to be responded to in a way you’ll find satisfying if you don’t link to the comments that you mean.

Programming language flamewars have always been lame on HN and we have no problem taking action against perpetrators when we’re alerted to them.