Francesco Allertsen - Issue #82

As you probably know, BSD and GNU have similar tools, but often completely different codebase. So, for example, there is a BSD grep and a GNU grep, and they are developed by different people and have also different parameters (some of the most popular ones are the same, like -r or -n).

What I didn’t know is that the performance of the two is actually quite different! This is an email written by the creator of GNU grep explaining some of the tricks they use to make it faster. The email is from 2010, so you may think that the BSD implementation could have caught up, but looks like it hasn’t.

According to this thread (from a few days ago) this is the performance difference.

For the same 1.5GB file size, the GNU implementation finishes in 1.3 seconds, while the BSD implementation takes 37 seconds! That’s a quite important difference!

Also, this has been tested on the latest OSX version, because OSX uses the BSD grep (although I don’t know if it’s the latest version, maybe I should run the same test on the latest BSD version for better comparison).

It’s actually interested the tricks that GNU grep uses to make it faster, and it could be interesting to read the source code and study the algorithm they use and try to make a similar clone as fast as possible.

The NES console is from the 80s, and game developers those days needed to write everything from scratch in custom assembly, and there were a lot of limitations in available resources.

There are a lot of articles about game development for the old console, and there was all kind of tricks that the developers needed to use to fit as much data in the minim amount of space. This video is from a game developer who has developed a game for the original NES, and he is explaining some of the technique he used to reduce the size of the game as much as possible, especially for the graphics for the game.

I think it’s extremely interesting to learn some of these techniques, even though they are not used anymore.

This article was published in November 1999, and it’s absolutely useless if you care about today’s technology, but it’s a very interest piece of information and technical details about the floppy disks.

I never knew it was possible to store more than 1440KB of data in a single floppy disk, but apparently, I was wrong, and it was common to store 1680KB (Microsoft was using this size to distribute Windows) and even up to 1720KB (although riskier).

There is always something to learn about previous technology, and I am always interested in technical articles, even if it’s about old technology.

HighwayHash is a pseudo-random-function developed by Google. This company reimplemented the same function using an interesting combination of Golang + Assembly with the goal of achieving performance.

The source code is actually quite interesting to read and easy to understand. It’s also easy to test it locally and play with it. If you need a fast HighwayHash implementation in Golang this could be a good option.