Software Unscripted

Nikita Prokopov, open-source Clojure developer and creator of the Fira Code typeface, discusses software disenchantment, Rust programming language, balancing developer ergonomics and performance, optimizing a parser, challenges of upgrading software libraries, impact of complexity on development, and personal preferences in software culture.

Richard interviews Brian Carroll, an expert in using WebAssembly in practice. They discuss the benefits and challenges of WebAssembly, its slow adoption, and its potential to replace JavaScript. They also explore the drawbacks of using Electron for app development and the efficiency of web browsers as a software delivery platform. The podcast compares WebAssembly and JavaScript, highlighting when to use each and discussing their advantages and performance differences. Additionally, they delve into the variations in SIMD instructions targeting specific architectures and the limitations of WebAssembly for front-end development. The podcast concludes with speculation about widespread adoption and the potential for WebAssembly to replace JavaScript in building applications.

Matt Godbolt, author of godbolt.org Compiler Explorer, discusses disassembling language designs including reference counting optimizations, destructors and unwinding, and defending the decision of NaN != NaN. They also explore the benefits of Dwarf Debug Format, stack unwinding, memory allocation strategies, and the logic behind NaN in programming. Additionally, they touch on reference counting implementation and advantages of atomic instructions for thread sharing.

In this podcast, Troels Henriksen, co-creator of the Futhark language, shares insights on designing compilers for faster performance. They discuss challenges in identifying dependencies in recursive functions, bringing names and scopes into functions, and the benefits of a compact tree representation in compiler design. They also explore how compilers can optimize program performance, the evolution of efficient function programming, and the goal of creating a fast functional programming language with automatic memory management.

Richard talks with José Valim, creator of Elixir, about gradual vs static typing. They discuss dynamic typing in TypeScript, expressiveness and correctness in API design, resurgence of static typing, notebooks in data science, and the tug of war between gradual and static typing.

Richard interviews Predrag Gruevski, author of cargo-semver-checks, on the challenges of semantic versioning in Rust, trade-offs in enforcement, issues with changing function types, alternative versioning, minor and patch versions, and automation in versioning schemes. They also discuss the tools rock glue and Trustfall for embedding rocks and querying codebases.

Chris Krycho, TypeScript expert, discusses challenges of migrating code to TypeScript at LinkedIn, trade-offs between Rust and TypeScript in companies and operating systems, differences between JSON decoders in Elm and TypeScript, handling payload errors and backwards compatibility, complexities of TypeScript's type system, and balancing API hiding and exposing.

Daniel Lemire, creator of simdjson, the fastest JSON parser, discusses parsing performance, benchmarking, and real-world experimentation. They explore multi-threading benefits in parsing, eliminating parsing steps with Captain Proto, iterative development, AVX2 and AVX512 performance impact, handling comments and strings, different parsing approaches, and surprising results with hash maps and index maps in the Rust compiler.

Richard talks with former Rust core team member Ashley Williams, aka ag_dubs,, about various different types of niche domain knowledge - from CSS tricks in web development to low-level systems programming, package managers, and even organization-specific domain knowledge. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Richard talks with HashiCorp cofounder Mitchell Hashimoto about a side project of his: a high-performance terminal emulator that he wrote using Zig and Swift, and which has become his daily driver terminal. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.