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Chris Wellons (null program)

Programmer writing about C, Emacs, cryptography, and software development practices.

https://nullprogram.com

Articles

Concurrent, atomic MSI hash tables

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 tabl

I have officially retired from Emacs

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 pl

My brave new code-signing world

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

dcmake: a new CMake debugger UI

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

WebAssembly as a Python extension platform

WebAssembly enables extending Python with architecture-independent code, allowing developers to use their preferred languages and tools without native compilation.

Freestyle linked lists tricks

Linked lists can be enhanced with new capabilities without disrupting the original structure, as demonstrated through building a key/value environment variable collection.