neon-sunset

ARM’s Scalable Vector Extensions: A Critical Look at SVE2 For Integer Workloads

Scalable Vector Extensions (SVE) is ARM’s latest SIMD extension to their instruction set, which was announced back in 2016. A follow-up SVE2 extension was announced in 2019, designed to incorporate all functionality from ARM’s current primary SIMD extension, NEON (aka ASIMD).

Despite being announced 5 years ago, there is currently no generally available CPU which supports any form of SVE (which excludes the [Fugaku supercomputer](https://www.fujitsu.com/global/about/innovation/

Dynamic PGO in .NET 6.0

Dynamic PGO (Profile-guided optimization) is a JIT-compiler optimization technique that allows JIT to collect additional information about surroundings (aka profile) in tier0 codegen in order to rely on it later during promotion from tier0 to tier1 for hot methods to make them even more efficient.

What exactly PGO can optimize for us?

Profile-driving inlining - inliner relies on PGO data and can be very aggressive for hot paths and care less about cold ones, see dotnet/runtime#52708 and dotnet/runtime#55478. A good example where it has visible effects is this StringBuilder benchmark:
Guarded devirtualization - most monomorphic virtual/interface calls can be devirtualized using PGO data, e.g.:

void DisposeMe(IDisposable d)

How to setup a practically free CDN using Backblaze B2 and Cloudflare

⚠️ Note 2023-01-21
Some things have changed since I originally wrote this in 2016. I have updated a few minor details, and the advice is still broadly the same, but there are some new Cloudflare features you can (and should) take advantage of. In particular, pay attention to Trevor Stevens' comment here from 22 January 2022, and Matt Stenson's useful caching advice. In addition, Backblaze, with whom Cloudflare are a Bandwidth Alliance partner, have published their own guide detailing how to use Cloudflare's Web Workers to cache content from B2 private buckets. That is worth reading,

58 bytes of CSS to look great nearly everywhere

When making this website, i wanted a simple, reasonable way to make it look good on most displays. Not counting any minimization techniques, the following 58 bytes worked well for me:

main {
  max-width: 38rem;
  padding: 2rem;
  margin: auto;
}

Trace .NET Core Applications on Linux with `strace`

Troubleshooting a running application can be difficult, usually it starts around checking log output and then following through the likely code paths to get an idea of where a failure may occur. In a development environment, you might attach a debugger a step through source, but troubleshooting isn't always that convenient. There are several helpful tools that can assist, but one that gives the most comprehensive view of a running application is strace. With strace you are able to see all of the system calls an application makes to get a detailed understanding of what is going on "under the hood" in order to troubleshoot an issue.

Take a simple "hello world" F# application, the kind you get from dotnet new console -lang F# -n strace-sample". Build it with dotnet build and then launch it with strace to get a trace of all the system calls in a file called trace.log(adjusting for your build output path if on a different framework vers

	# top-most EditorConfig file
	root = true

	# Unix-style newlines with a newline ending every file
	[*]
	end_of_line = lf
	insert_final_newline = true
	trim_trailing_whitespace = true

	[*.cs]

	using System;
	using System.Collections;
	using System.Collections.Generic;
	using System.Threading.Tasks;

	internal sealed partial class AsyncParallelQueue<T>
	{
	/// <summary>
	/// <para>
	/// The purpose of this class is to separate what must be done inside a lock (everything this class does) from

	#!/bin/bash

	gdb -p "$1" -batch -ex 'set {short}$rip = 0x050f' -ex 'set $rax=231' -ex 'set $rdi=0' -ex 'cont'