I spent a week creating a new deflate implementation from scratch in C named tugz to provide an Info-ZIP-compatible zip program for w64devkit 2.10.1 (released today). I also replaced busybox-w32’s deflate-based unzip, gzip, gunzip, and zcat apps as well. My new deflate performs better than zlib but ...

My blog began as a blosxom (Perl) site running on a VPS. In 2011 I moved to the new GitHub Pages, with the site generated statically by Jekyll (Ruby) on a GitHub server. It was a no-brainer: easier, faster, and cheaper, better in every way. After 15 years of Jekyll, this week I replaced it with a ne...

The past year has been exciting for w64devkit, which like any software distribution is never complete. Peter0x44 joined as co-maintainer, and has pushed the project in good, new directions, with ideas I would never have considered. Many of his improvements have gone back upstream, and so you may ben...

Stars! is a 1995 4X game (explore, expand, exploit, exterminate) for 16-bit Windows 3.1 that I first played ~28 years ago. While Windows is famously backwards compatible, it’s notoriously difficult to play Stars! today. Windows x64 cannot run 16-bit applications, and playing requires either retro ha...

Readers will be familiar with Mask-Step-Index (MSI) hash tables, a technique for building fast, open-addressed hash tables in a dozen lines of code. If multiple threads or processes access an MSI table with at least one still inserting elements, care must be taken to avoid data races. This article w...

This past Tuesday I typed C-x C-c in Emacs for the last time after 20 years of daily use. Though nearly half that time was gradually retiring it, switching to modal editing, then to Vim. Emacs is a platform, and I’d grown accustomed to its applications, especially those I built myself. There was no ...

The new w64devkit release two weeks ago is the first to be code-signed with my identity, verified by Microsoft’s certificate chain. Currently only the release packaging is signed — the self-extracting archive and its payload — but I will soon code-sign individual EXEs and DLLs within the distributio...

CMake has a --debugger mode since 3.27 (July 2023), allowing software to manipulate it interactively through the Debugger Adaptor Protocol (DAP), an HTTP-like protocol passing JSON messages. Debugger front-ends can start, stop, step, breakpoint, query variables, etc. a live CMake. When I came across...

In February I left my employer after nearly two decades of service. In the moment I was optimistic, yet unsure I made the right choice. Dust settled, I’m now absolutely sure I chose correctly. I’m happier and better for it. There were multiple factors, but it’s not mere chance it coincides with thes...

I came across a recent article on making Linux system calls from a Wine process. Windows programs running under Wine are still normal Linux processes and may interact with the Linux kernel like any other process. None of this was surprising, and the demonstration works just as I expect. Still, it go...

Software above some complexity level tends to sport an extension language, becoming a kind of software platform itself. Lua fills this role well, and of course there’s JavaScript for web technologies. WebAssembly generalizes this, and any Wasm-targeting programming language can extend a Wasm-hosting...

Linked lists are a data structure basic building block, with especially flexible allocation behavior. They’re not just a useful starting point, but sometimes a sound foundation for future growth. I’m going to start with the beginner stuff, then without disrupting the original linked list, enhance it...

In preparation for a future project, I was thinking about at the unix find utility. It operates a file system hierarchies, with basic operations selected and filtered using a specialized expression language. Users compose operations using unary and binary operators, grouping with parentheses for pre...

Back in 2017 I wrote about a technique for creating closures in C using JIT-compiled wrapper. It’s neat, though rarely necessary in real programs, so I don’t think about it often. I applied it to qsort, which sadly accepts no context pointer. More practical would be working around insufficient custo...

As I continue to reflect on arenas and lifetimes in C++, I realized that dealing with destructors is not so onerous. In fact, it does not even impact my established arena usage! That is, implicit RAII-style deallocation at scope termination, which works even in plain old C. With a small change we ca...

Update October 2025: further enhancements. Patrice Roy’s new book, C++ Memory Management, has made me more conscious of object lifetimes. C++ is stricter than C about lifetimes, and common, textbook memory management that’s sound in C is less so in C++ — more than I realized. The book also presents ...

In a recent, real world problem I needed to load a heterogeneous sequence of records from a buffer. Record layout is defined in a header before the sequence. Each field is numeric, with a unique name composed of non-empty alphanumeric period-delimited segments, where segments signify nested structur...