Hacker News: malkia

New comment by malkia in "Modern SQLite: Features You Didn't Know It Had"

malkia — Fri, 03 Apr 2026 02:11:20 +0000

One more "hidden" fact - Windows uses sqlite a lot, for a lot of tables. There is even

    "C:\Windows\System32\winsqlite3.dll"

and

    "C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Include\10.0.27975.0\um\winsqlite\winsqlite3.h"
    "C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Include\10.0.27975.0\um\winsqlite\winsqlite3ext.h"

Well it's compiled in it's own way, which may not be to your liking, but it's there to use :)

New comment by malkia in "Modern SQLite: Features You Didn't Know It Had"

malkia — Thu, 02 Apr 2026 18:49:05 +0000

In the past I've used the backup API - https://sqlite.org/backup.html - in order to load in memory a copy of sqlite db, and have another live one. I would do this after certain user action, and then by doing a diff, I would know what changed... I guess poor way of implementing PostgreSQL events... but it worked!

Granted it was small DB (few megabytes), I also wanted to avoid collecting changes one by one, I simply wanted a diff over last time.

New comment by malkia in "LLMs work best when the user defines their acceptance criteria first"

malkia — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 21:40:51 +0000

Are we now at the bottom of the the Uncanny Valley of AI?

New comment by malkia in "Facebook Appears to Be Down"

malkia — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 22:41:36 +0000

I pre-blame... an artifical intellect!

New comment by malkia in "AVX2 is slower than SSE2-4.x under Windows ARM emulation"

malkia — Wed, 18 Feb 2026 19:07:42 +0000

You can ... to a degree - Google for "XtaCache"

New comment by malkia in "Gwtar: A static efficient single-file HTML format"

malkia — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 04:58:17 +0000

Anyone else - GWAAAR! - G.W.A.R! - I guess the only metal nerd here

New comment by malkia in "I fixed Windows native development"

malkia — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 22:01:35 +0000

You can provide custom options to winget, and in there where to install it too (and additional components you need).

New comment by malkia in "I fixed Windows native development"

malkia — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 22:00:56 +0000

it's not ideal, but much much much better!

New comment by malkia in "I fixed Windows native development"

malkia — Sun, 15 Feb 2026 17:55:15 +0000

Or... you can

"winget install Microsoft.VisualStudio.BuildTools"

"winget install Microsoft.WindowsSDK.10.0.26100"

New comment by malkia in "Microsoft open-sources LiteBox, a security-focused library OS"

malkia — Fri, 06 Feb 2026 17:42:34 +0000

There are containers, and one of their users is the Windows Sandbox - https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/security/applicati...

New comment by malkia in "We will ban you and ridicule you in public if you waste our time on crap reports"

malkia — Thu, 22 Jan 2026 13:53:17 +0000

Thank you for sharing the article! Now I'm puzzled this about myself - what I am...

New comment by malkia in "Eat Real Food"

malkia — Wed, 07 Jan 2026 21:24:11 +0000

Make Jerkey Without Sugar Again!

New comment by malkia in "Python 3.15’s interpreter for Windows x86-64 should hopefully be 15% faster"

malkia — Fri, 26 Dec 2025 07:36:59 +0000

Wow - clojure's recur in C/C++ - awesome!

New comment by malkia in "Go's escape analysis and why my function return worked"

malkia — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 16:35:56 +0000

For me, avoiding heap, or rather avoiding gc came when I was working (at work) on backend and web server using Java, and there was default rule for our code that if gc takes more than 1% (I don't remember the exact value) then the server gets restarted.

Coming (back then) from C/C++ gamedev - I was puzzled, then I understood the mantra - it's better for the process to die fast, instead of being pegged by GC and not answering to the client.

Then we started looking what made it use GC so much.

I guess it might be similar to Go - in the past I've seen some projects using a "baloon" - to circumvent Go's GC heuristic - e.g. if you blow this dummy baloon that takes half of your memory GC might not kick so much... Something like this... Then again obviously bad solution long term

New comment by malkia in "A “frozen” dictionary for Python"

malkia — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 15:57:17 +0000

Welcome to starlark :)

New comment by malkia in "Scala 3 slowed us down?"

malkia — Tue, 09 Dec 2025 07:58:17 +0000

Yeah, what you want to know is which change caused the slowdown, or maybe improved the performance and reasonable metric behind it (for example frame-rate for a game, or something like this).

New comment by malkia in "Scala 3 slowed us down?"

malkia — Mon, 08 Dec 2025 01:23:04 +0000

Good points there - Thanks @spockz!

New comment by malkia in "Scala 3 slowed us down?"

malkia — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 21:29:59 +0000

Sorry, I'm coming from C++-ish background - can anyone explain what's going on :)

New comment by malkia in "Scala 3 slowed us down?"

malkia — Sun, 07 Dec 2025 21:27:49 +0000

Benchmarking requires a bit of different setup than the rest of the testing, especially if you want down to the ms timings.

We have continous benchmarking of one of our tools, it's written in C++, and to get "same" results everytime we launch it on the same machine. This is far from ideal, but otherwise there be either noisy neighbours, pesky host (if it's vm), etc. etc.

One idea that we thought was what if we can run the same test on the same machine several times, and check older/newer code (or ideally through switches), and this could work for some codepaths, but not for really continous checkins.

Just wondering what folks do. I can assume what, but there is always something hidden, not well known.

New comment by malkia in "Migrating to Bazel symbolic macros"

malkia — Sun, 30 Nov 2025 02:59:08 +0000

Lua, by virtue of being thread oblivious - may work, but under the curtain (calling "C" code) there is nothing to protect you against thread-safety related issues.

Python "deals" with it

All three options though are full blown Turing-complete languages - e.g. they can loop forever. You don't want that in CI, or a build system.

Starlark is concurrency safe. Top-level global values, once initialized, are frozen (read-only), hence they can be safely accessed by multiple threads. There are no "global" effects (AFAIK), apart from actually doing I/O by calling actions (processes, etc.)

Blaze (bazel's parent) used Python, and had these non-hermetic issues, because you can do anything with Python (actually "Lua" might be easier to sandbox, but maybe python too - not sure).

Point is, starlark is well suited for this job. It wasn't - "Hey let's design this new language". It's really Python but with limited powers for a reason, to enable other unlimited powers (concurrency, avoid recursion, etc).