Recommended Reads

Await | Writing an OS in Rust by Philipp Oppermann delivers an insightful and masterfully explained view of Rust’s default multitasking model. It is a lengthy article that deserves careful reading. In return, it’ll teach you what exactly async, await, poll, pin… are and how they are implemented.

Scheduling in Go by William Kennedy; this three-part article is the best literature about Go’s concurrency model: Ms, Ps & Gs. It is a must for writing concurrent Go code.

Reflections on trusting trust by Ken Thompson is a revealing paper about how every piece of software we build and run places trust in the integrity of lower layers: the compiler, linker, OS, hardware…

The moral is obvious. You can’t trust code that you did not totally create yourself.

Which is practically never the case.

Software freedom isn’t about licenses – it’s about power by Alyssa Rosenzweig argues that licensing is not enough to protect software and user freedom. The article seems even more relevant now than it was when it was written in 2021. The original post seems to be missing, so I’ve linked the copy in linuxreviews.org.

How to Ruin a Perfectly Good Container by Ben Laurie. I disagree with much of what is said here, but it is a thought-provoking rant-ish article that does make some valid points. My article about using object capabilities as the only external access method in WebAssembly argues against some points; e.g. we don’t need to re-implement POSIX, there are more approaches.

What is CapTP, and what does it enable? by Christine Lemmer-Webber develops on the Capability Transport Protocol, why it is cool and what can be done with it.

A categorized list of all Java and JVM features since JDK 8 to 21 by Dávid Csákvári. It may seem out of place in this list, but my experience working with Java at IBM/StreamSets has shown me how drastically different it is to work with Java 21 compared to Java 8. I am glad Java is positively evolving again after years of stagnation.