jboner

Latency Comparison Numbers (~2012)
----------------------------------
L1 cache reference                           0.5 ns
Branch mispredict                            5   ns
L2 cache reference                           7   ns                      14x L1 cache
Mutex lock/unlock                           25   ns
Main memory reference                      100   ns                      20x L2 cache, 200x L1 cache
Compress 1K bytes with Zippy             3,000   ns        3 us
Send 1K bytes over 1 Gbps network       10,000   ns       10 us
Read 4K randomly from SSD*             150,000   ns      150 us          ~1GB/sec SSD

datagrok

This article is now published on my website: Prefer Subshells for Context.

dupuy

Markdown and reStructuredText

GitHub supports several lightweight markup languages for documentation; the most popular ones (generally, not just at GitHub) are Markdown and reStructuredText. Markdown is sometimes considered easier to use, and is often preferred when the purpose is simply to generate HTML. On the other hand, reStructuredText is more extensible and powerful, with native support (not just embedded HTML) for tables, as well as things like automatic generation of tables of contents.