research!rsc

My post “Floating-Point Printing and Parsing Can Be Simple And Fast” depends on fast unrounded scaling, defined as: ⟨x⟩=⌊2x⌋||(2x≠⌊2x⌋)uscale(x,e,p)=⟨x·2e·10p⟩ The unrounded form of x∈ℝ , ⟨x⟩ , is the integer value of ⌊x⌋ concatenated with two more bits:…

Introduction A floating point number f has the form f=m·2e where m is called the mantissa and e is a signed integer exponent.

Introduction Donald Knuth wrote his 1989 paper “A Simple Program Whose Proof Isn’t” as part of a tribute to Edsger Dijkstra on the occasion of Dijkstra’s 60th birthday.

These are the posts in the “Floating Point Formatting” series, which started in 2011 and continued in 2026.

I have been debugging some code I did not write and was reminded of this technique.

Setting the Stage Does this sound familar?

Introduction Andres Freund published the existence of the xz attack on 2024-03-29 to the public oss-security@openwall mailing list.

Over a period of over two years, an attacker using the name “Jia Tan” worked as a diligent, effective contributor to the xz compression library, eventually being granted commit access and maintainership.

I opened GopherCon (USA) in October with the talk “Go Changes”, which looked at how Go evolves, the importance of data in making shared decisions, and why opt-in telemetry in the Go toolchain is a useful, effective, and appropriate new source of data.

I opened GopherCon Australia in early November with the talk “Go Testing By Example”.

Supply chain security is a hot topic today, but it is a very old problem.

The original ANSI C standard, C89, introduced the concept of “undefined behavior,” which was used both to describe the effect of outright bugs like accessing memory in a freed object and also to capture the fact that existing implementations differed about

Suppose I have a large number of M&Ms and want to estimate what fraction of them have Peter’s face on them.

For decades, discussion of software reuse was far more common than actual software reuse.

Nearly all of Go’s distinctive design decisions were aimed at making software engineering simpler and easier.

[Cross-posting from last year’s Go contributors AMA on Reddit, because it’s still important to remember.]

People I work with recognize my computer easily: it's the one with nothing but yellow windows and blue bars on the screen.

28.

Stephen Hawking begins A Brief History of Time with this story: A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy.

UTF-8 is a way to encode Unicode code points—integer values from 0 through 10FFFF—into a byte stream, and it is far simpler than many people realize.

In 1997, on his retirement from Bell Labs, Doug McIlroy gave a fascinating talk about the “History of Computing at Bell Labs.”

This is the story of a clever trick that's been around for at least 35 years, in which array values can be left uninitialized and then read during normal operations, yet the code behaves correctly no matter what garbage is sitting in the array.

Section 7.1.2 of the Volume 4 pre-fascicle 0A of Donald Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming is titled “Boolean Evaluation.”

Today, window systems seem as inevitable as hierarchical file systems, a fundamental building block of computer systems.