Programming languages typically support two different features for abbreviating complex types - type aliases and newtypes. However, type aliases lead to poor error messages and slow compile times, which is why I chose not to support them in my recently released language, PolySubML. In this post, I…

By Huon Wilson — 05 Mar 2025 Rust’s match statement can do a lot of things, even C-style fallthough to the next branch, despite having no real support for it. It turns out to a “shallow” feature, where the C to Rust translation is easily done, without needing to understand the code itself. The…

After I wrote YARR (Yet Another Rust Resource, with requisite pirate mentions), one of my friends tried it out. He gave me some really useful insights as he went through it, letting me see what was hard about learning Rust from a newcomer's perspective. Unsurprisingly, lifetimes are a challenge—and…

I recently tried to optimize convolutions using SIMD instructions, but what I thought would be a simple task ended up taking me days, with issue after issue popping up one after another. Some of them make sense in hindsight, but others were utterly baffling. While the specific examples are for…

Last time saw us endeavoring upon a trilogy to bring rows crashing down from their high-flying AST nodes into the realities of our lowly IR. Our goals this time are less highfalutin. We’re going to be lowering items. I can’t tell you how relieved I am to see this titled “Part 7”, not “Part 7a”.…

Introduction: Why Build a DNS Server? Ever wondered how your browser finds websites? It all starts with DNS (Domain Name System). DNS servers are the backbone of the internet, translating human-readable domain names (like google.com) into IP addresses. But have you ever wondered how these…

Graphing Calculator Story Home Products Order Contact Gallery Copyright © 2004 Ron Avitzur. Pacific Tech's Graphing Calculator has a long history. I began the work in 1985 while in school. That became Milo, and later became part of FrameMaker. Over the last twenty years, many people have contributed…