Simon Willison’s Weblog

Ladybird set to adopt Swift. Andreas Kling on the Ladybird browser project's search for a memory-safe language to use in conjunction with their existing C++ codebase:

Over the last few months, I've asked a bunch of folks to pick some little part of our project and try rewriting it in the different languages we were evaluating. The feedback was very clear: everyone preferred Swift!

Andreas previously worked for Apple on Safari, but this was still a surprising result given the current relative lack of widely adopted open source Swift projects outside of the Apple ecosystem.

This change is currently blocked on the upcoming Swift 6 release:

We aren't able to start using it just yet, as the current release of Swift ships with a version of Clang that's too old to grok our existing C++ codebase. But when Swift 6 comes out of beta this fall, we will begin using it!

# 11th August 2024, 6:38 pm / browsers, c-plus-plus, andreas-kling, ladybird

Dragonfly: A modern replacement for Redis and Memcached (via) I was initially pretty skeptical of the tagline: does Redis really need a “modern” replacement? But the Background section of the README makes this look like a genuinely interesting project. It re-imagines Redis to have its keyspace partitioned across multiple threads, and uses the VLL lock manager described in a 2014 paper to “compose atomic multi-key operations without using mutexes or spinlocks”. The initial benchmarks show up to a 25x increase in throughput compared to Redis. It’s written in C++.

# 30th May 2022, 10:02 pm / c-plus-plus, redis

Interactive Workflows for C++ with Jupyter. Whoa, this really works... not just an interactive C++ REPL in a Jupyter notebook, but inline graph plotting support and interactive widgets as well. Scroll to the bottom of the article for Binder links which let you fire up an interactive C++ REPL in your browser and start interacting with it instantly.

# 29th November 2017, 9:51 pm / c-plus-plus, jupyter

RE2: a principled approach to regular expression matching. Google have open sourced RE2, the C++ regular expression library they developed for Google Code Search, Sawzall, Bigtable and other internal projects. Unlike PCRE it avoids the potential for exponential run time and unbounded stack usage and guarantees that searches complete in linear time, mainly by dropping support for back references.

# 12th March 2010, 9:28 am / c-plus-plus, google, open-source, pcre, re2, regex, russcox

Apache Qpid. A new open source AMQP message queue with implementations in C++ and Java, developed by engineers from Red Hat, IONA and JP Morgan Chase. Anyone tried this yet? Looks pretty good on paper.

# 5th February 2009, 11:01 pm / amqp, apache, c-plus-plus, iona, java, jpmorganchase, message-queues, open-source, qpid, red-hat

Protocol Buffers: Google’s Data Interchange Format. Open sourced today. Highly efficient binary protocol for storing and transmitting structured data between C++, Java and Python. Uses a .proto file describing the data structure which is compiled to classes in those languages for serializing and deserializing. 3-10 times smaller and 20-100 times faster than XML.

# 8th July 2008, 8:20 am / c-plus-plus, google, idf, java, open-source, protocolbuffers, python, xml

jsjuicer. Another conditional comment respecting minifier tool, this time in C++. Ships with a command line utility, unlike JavaScript::Minifier.

# 4th June 2007, 5:57 pm / adrian-johnston, c-plus-plus, javascript, jsjuicer, jsmin, minification