frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

The Scalar Select Anti-Pattern

https://matklad.github.io/2025/05/14/scalar-select-aniti-pattern.html
47•goranmoomin•11mo ago

Comments

castratikron•11mo ago
As long as processing one event does not affect any of the other events in the batch. E.g. events are file IO, and processing one event causes another event's descriptor to get closed before that event can be processed.
wahern•11mo ago
If the close routine on an event source, or the low-level (e.g. epoll) registration, deregistration, and dequeueing logic doesn't know how to keep polling and liveness state consistent between userspace and the kernel, they've got much bigger problems. This looks like Rust code so I would hope the event stream libraries are, e.g., keeping Rc'd file objects and properly managing reference integrity viz-a-viz kernel state before the application caller ever sees the first dequeued event in a cycle. This is a perennial issue with event loop libraries and buggy application code (in every language). One can't just deal with raw file descriptors, call the close syscall directly, etc, hoping to keep state consistent implicitly. There's an unavoidable tie-in needed between application's wrappers around low-level resources and the event loop in use.
taeric•11mo ago
I'm not entirely clear on what the proposal is at the end? Seems that the long term answer as to "which of these implications to pursue" is "all of them?" Simply taking in a batch of instructions doesn't immediately change much? You still have to be able to do each of the other things. And you will still expect some dependencies between batches that could possibly interact in the same ways.

In a sense, this is no different than how your processor is dealing with instructions coming in. You will have some instructions that can be run without waiting on previous ones. You will have some that can complete quickly. You will have some that are stalled on other parts of the system. (I'm sure I could keep wording an instruction to match each of the implications.)

To that end, part of your program has to deal with taking off "whats next" and finding how to prepare that to pass to the execution portion of your program. You can make that only take in batches, but you are almost certainly responsible for how you chunk them moreso than whatever process is sending the instructions to you? Even if you are handed clear batches, it is incumbent on you to batch them as they go off to the rest of the system.

lmz•11mo ago
I guess the proposal is "instead of fetching and acting on one event at a time, consider fetching all available events and look for opportunities to optimize which ones you process (e.g. by prioritization or by skipping certain events if superseded by newer ones)".
taeric•11mo ago
I mean, I got that. But you could as easily say "instead of fetching and acting on one event at a time, fetch and triage/route instructions into applicable queues."

In particular, there is no guarantee that moving to batches changes any of the problems you may have from acting on a single one at a time. To that end, you will have to look into all of the other strategies sooner or later.

Following from that, the problem is not "processMessage" or whatever. The problem is that you haven't broken "processMessage" up into the constituent "receive/triage/process/resolve" loop that you almost certainly will have to end up with.

malkia•11mo ago
in CPU's - pipelining!
jchw•11mo ago
I believe something similar is going on internally in Windows with event queues. It coalesces and prioritizes input events when multiple of them pile up before you're able to pop new events off of the queue. (For some events, e.g. pointer events, you can even go and query frames that were coalesced during input handling.) On the application/API end, it just looks like a "scalar select" loop, but actually it is doing batching behavior for input events!

(On the flip side, if you have a Wayland client that falls behind on processing its event queue, it can crash. On the whole this isn't really that bad but if you have something sending a shit load of events it can cause very bad behavior. This has made me wonder if it's possible, with UNIX domain sockets, to implement some kind of event coalescing on the server-side, to avoid flooding the client with high-precision pointer movement events while it's falling behind. Maybe start coalescing when FIONREAD gets to some high watermark? No idea...)

Async Rust never left the MVP state

https://tweedegolf.nl/en/blog/237/async-rust-never-left-the-mvp-state
39•pjmlp•42m ago•2 comments

Train Your Own LLM from Scratch

https://github.com/angelos-p/llm-from-scratch
180•kristianpaul•3h ago•21 comments

Hand Drawn QR Codes

https://sethmlarson.dev/hand-drawn-qr-codes
67•jollyjerry•4h ago•6 comments

Bun is being ported from Zig to Rust

https://github.com/oven-sh/bun/commit/46d3bc29f270fa881dd5730ef1549e88407701a5
452•SergeAx•6h ago•317 comments

Lessons for Agentic Coding: What should we do when code is cheap?

https://www.dbreunig.com/2026/05/04/10-lessons-for-agentic-coding.html
13•ingve•1h ago•8 comments

CVE-2026-31431: Copy Fail vs. rootless containers

https://www.dragonsreach.it/2026/05/04/cve-2026-31431-copy-fail-rootless-containers/
85•averi•4h ago•27 comments

How OpenAI delivers low-latency voice AI at scale

https://openai.com/index/delivering-low-latency-voice-ai-at-scale/
390•Sean-Der•12h ago•123 comments

The Car That Watches You Back: The Advertising Infrastructure of Modern Cars

https://nobodyaskedforthis.lol/posts/connected-car/
86•cadito•6h ago•61 comments

Farewell to a Giant of Botany

https://nautil.us/farewell-to-a-giant-of-botany-1280409
16•Brajeshwar•2d ago•0 comments

About 10% of AMC movie showings sell zero tickets. This site finds them

https://walzr.com/empty-screenings
126•MrBuddyCasino•3h ago•100 comments

Agent Skills

https://addyosmani.com/blog/agent-skills/
235•BOOSTERHIDROGEN•10h ago•100 comments

Gaps in national food production, worldwide

https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-025-01173-4
53•simonebrunozzi•19h ago•28 comments

pgxbackup: Continuity Support for pgBackRest

https://thebuild.com/blog/2026/05/01/pgxbackup-continuity-support-for-pgbackrest/
40•Wingy•2d ago•4 comments

Securing a DoD contractor: Finding a multi-tenant authorization vulnerability

https://www.strix.ai/blog/how-strix-found-zero-auth-vulnerability-dod-backed-startup
194•bearsyankees•14h ago•80 comments

When Networking Doesn't Work

https://www.os2museum.com/wp/when-networking-doesnt-work/
59•kencausey•11h ago•10 comments

Does Employment Slow Cognitive Decline? Evidence from Labor Market Shocks

https://www.nber.org/papers/w35117
274•littlexsparkee•16h ago•256 comments

Kids bypass age verification with fake moustaches

https://www.theregister.com/2026/05/04/uk_online_safety_act_age_checks_subvert/
70•dreadsword•3h ago•31 comments

Redis array: short story of a long development process

https://antirez.com/news/164
274•antirez•17h ago•89 comments

2-D Mathematical Curves

https://www.2dcurves.com/
20•the-mitr•3h ago•0 comments

Biscuit

https://github.com/yattsu/biscuit
25•unixfg•4h ago•0 comments

Talking to strangers at the gym

https://thienantran.com/talking-to-35-strangers-at-the-gym/
1322•thitran•20h ago•627 comments

Testing macOS on the Apple Network Server 2.0 ROMs

http://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2026/05/testing-macos-on-apple-network-server.html
85•zdw•1d ago•17 comments

1966 Ford Mustang Converted into a Tesla with Working 'Full Self-Driving'

https://electrek.co/2026/05/02/tesla-1966-mustang-ev-conversion-full-self-driving/
164•Brajeshwar•16h ago•122 comments

Microsoft Edge stores all passwords in memory in clear text, even when unused

https://twitter.com/L1v1ng0ffTh3L4N/status/2051308329880719730
518•cft•13h ago•183 comments

Y Combinator's Stake in OpenAI (0.6%?)

https://daringfireball.net/2026/05/y_combinators_stake_in_openai
299•gyomu•7h ago•46 comments

I am worried about Bun

https://wwj.dev/posts/i-am-worried-about-bun/
477•remote-dev•15h ago•314 comments

How Monero’s proof of work works

https://blog.alcazarsec.com/tech/posts/how-moneros-proof-of-work-works
279•alcazar•17h ago•196 comments

PyInfra 3.8.0

https://github.com/pyinfra-dev/pyinfra/releases/tag/v3.8.0
268•wowi42•19h ago•89 comments

What I'm Hearing About Cognitive Debt (So Far)

https://margaretstorey.com/blog/2026/02/18/cognitive-debt-revisited/
188•raphaelcosta•5h ago•109 comments

Formatting a 25M-line codebase overnight

https://stripe.dev/blog/formatting-an-entire-25-million-line-codebase-overnight-the-rubyfmt-story
163•r00k•11h ago•83 comments