28th May 2019 - Link Blog
gls: Goroutine local storage (via) Go doesn't provide a mechanism for having "goroutine local" variables (like threadlocals in Python but for goroutines), and the structure of the language makes it really hard to get something working. JT Olio figured out a truly legendary hack: Go's introspection lets you see the current stack, so he figured out a way to encode a base-16 identifer tag into the call order of 16 special nested functions.
I particularly like the "What are people saying?" section of the README:
"Wow, that's horrifying."
"This is the most terrible thing I have seen in a very long time."
"Where is it getting a context from? Is this serializing all the requests? What the heck is the client being bound to? What are these tags? Why does he need callers? Oh god no. No no no."
Recent articles
- The Axios supply chain attack used individually targeted social engineering - 3rd April 2026
- Highlights from my conversation about agentic engineering on Lenny's Podcast - 2nd April 2026
- Mr. Chatterbox is a (weak) Victorian-era ethically trained model you can run on your own computer - 30th March 2026