Top all-time · #1448
Anil Madhavapeddy
Personal blog · anil.recoil.org/notes · on HN as avsmprogrammingsystemsai
Anil Madhavapeddy's personal blog at anil.recoil.org covers programming, systems and ai. Since 2010, 49 different Hacker News readers have linked it 103 times, most often “Unikernels: Library Operating System for the Cloud”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 3 of 31 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
Anil Madhavapeddy's research site, linked for papers and notes on unikernels, library operating systems such as Mirage, and OCaml. Commenters mostly cite its papers as technical background.
- Recommended for · 3 comments
- The Mirage paper called a pretty easy read for something with an abstract; commenters say to read the research and try some of the linked papers.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 31 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Anil Madhavapeddy's research combines computer science and environmental science at the University of Cambridge
Most-linked posts?
- Unikernels: Library Operating System for the Cloud5 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2013-06-18
- Compiling OCaml directly to a new cloud operating system4 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2010-10-05
- Dear ACM, you're doing AI wrong but you can still get it right4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-12-18
- My (very) fast zero-allocation webserver using OxCaml3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2026-02-01
- /papers/2011-cufp-scribe-preprint.pdf3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2013-04-07
- /papers/2010-icfp-xen.pdf2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2013-11-11
- /papers/2015-nsdi-jitsu.pdf2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-03-25
- Under the hood with Apple's new Containerization framework2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-06-11
- Programming FPGAs Using OCaml2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-02-07
- Porting a complete HTML5 parser and browser test suite [from Python to OCaml us2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-12-17
What Hacker News says?
(Unikernel cofounder here) When acquiring our company, Solomon took us to a remote farm in France for a week for an offsite, fed us fantastic food and wine, and the first prototype of that Docker for Mac VM was working by the end of the week! It took a few months to hack together the shell. There's a video of Solomon and the pinãta launch party on my blog ;-) https://anil.recoil.org/notes/cacm-docker-cover#getting-i…
Comment linking /notes/cacm-docker-cover
on “Docker is weird”Submitted Just the rumour of a bug is enough to find an exploit these days as a story · 399 points
HN discussionHi! I'm from the EC2 team. This is a great tool to help uncover if CPU and memory NUMA within a VM aligns to the physical host or not: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/srg/netos/projects/ipc-ben... Paper from the USENIX 2012 conference: http://anil.recoil.org/papers/drafts/2012-usenix-ipc-draft1.... EC2 instances have been NUMA optimized since we launched our CC1 instances in 2010. I encourage you to try ipc-bench…
Comment linking /papers/drafts/2012-usenix-ipc-draft1.pdf
on “Twitter migrates data to Google Cloud”- nl · 2010-10-06
Submitted Compiling OCaml directly to a new cloud operating system as a story · 37 points
HN discussion This is good though it's not clear whether these papers will appear in the PMC Open Access subset ( https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/tools/openftlist/ ) and be bulk downloadable. I've been doing some work with colleagues at Cambridge and Imperial over the last year on using LLMs to improve evidence synthesis, primarily trying to find papers on the effectiveness of certain Conservation interventions. It's becoming clear…
Comment linking /notes/uk-national-data-lib
on “Starting July 1, academic publishers can't paywall NIH-funded research”Submitted Reviewing the second year of OCaml Labs in 2014 as a story · 20 points
HN discussionYou can read the original paper about Mirage here: http://anil.recoil.org/papers/2013-asplos-mirage.pdf (it's a pretty easy read for something with an abstract). I love this idea so much. There's also OSv which targets the JVM instead of OCamL. It's an open source commercial enterprise. https://github.com/cloudius-systems/osv
Comment linking /papers/2013-asplos-mirage.pdf
on “The Bitcoin Piñata”Submitted Under the hood with Apple's new Containerization framework as a story · 6 points
HN discussionTo be completely honest, I currently only use LLMs to assist me in writing documentation (and translating articles), but I know that other people are looking into it: https://anil.recoil.org/wiki?t=%23projects
Comment linking /wiki?t=%23projects
on “OCaml as my primary language”Submitted Dear ACM, you're doing AI wrong but you can still get it right as a story · 5 points
HN discussionResponding to pjmlp, a cool project I saw recently that's related to the ones you mentioned is Unikernels [1]. They noticed that a challenge faced by a lot of those projects is hardware support--each OS has to ship with a huge set of drivers to be widely usable. They sidestep this by targeting a VM, which exposes a single hardware interface no matter what it's running on. [1]: http://anil.recoil.org/papers/2013-aspl…
Comment linking /papers/2013-asplos-mirage.pdf
on “Booting to Rust”Submitted Socially self-hosting source code with Tangled on Bluesky as a story · 5 points
HN discussionThat's what I'm thinking. Take a look at http://spin.atomicobject.com/2014/09/27/reimagining-operatin... for an overview of what's going on in this area. If you're running containers on a hypervisor, with files on storage servers elsewhere, most of the Linux kernel is dead weight. Most of the kernel can be replaced by a modest glue library. Here's one, written in OCaml: http://anil.recoil.org/papers/2013-asplos-mira…
Comment linking /papers/2013-asplos-mirage.pdf
on “Google discloses three severe vulnerabilities in Apple OS X”Submitted Mapping urban and rural British hedgehogs as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI would be careful about dismissing agentic cyber capabilities purely based on false positives. You only need a single true positive bug and the shift this year has been agents that are extremely good at not only finding exploits but stringing them together. A counterpoint: https://anil.recoil.org/notes/rumour-is-the-exploit
Comment linking /notes/rumour-is-the-exploit
on “Greg Kroah-Hartman – Security in the LLM Age [video]”Submitted WebAssembly on exotic architectures (a 2025 roundup) as a story · 4 points
HN discussion(co-author of the OCaml memory model paper here) The details of the 'LDRF' (local data race freedom) property are described in detail here: https://anil.recoil.org/papers/2018-pldi-memorymodel.pdf The performance numbers are in the paper abstract: "our evaluation demonstrates that it is possible to balance a comprehensible memory model with a reasonable (no overhead on x86, ~0.6% on ARM) sequential performance trade…
Comment linking /papers/2018-pldi-memorymodel.pdf
on “OCaml Multicore merged upstream”- a0 · 2014-09-03
Submitted Talks from OCaml Labs During ICFP 2014 as a story · 4 points
HN discussion The html5lib conformance tests when combined with the WHATWG specs are even more powerful! I managed to build a typed version of this in OCaml in a few hours ( https://anil.recoil.org/notes/aoah-2025-15 ) yesterday, but I also left an agent building a pure OCaml HTML5 _validator_ last night. This run has (just in the last hour) combined the html5lib expect tests with https://github.com/validator/validator/tree/main/…
Comment linking /notes/aoah-2025-15
on “I ported JustHTML from Python to JavaScript with Codex CLI and GPT-5.2 in hours”Submitted OCaml's module language is the perfect fit for agentic programming as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThere are other approaches that yield Unikernels [1]. I don't quite understand your point about kernel mode and why that would be a problem under this scenario. The code is your own and you only use the OS components you require. The ASPLOS article has more detail on the approach and trade-offs [2]. [1] see table 2 at http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2566628 [2] http://anil.recoil.org/papers/2013-asplos-mirage.pdf
Comment linking /papers/2013-asplos-mirage.pdf
on “My First Unikernel”Submitted Hitting a NERVE with attacks on AI-powered brain-computer interfaces as a story · 3 points
HN discussionIf you eliminate the hypervisor, you don't have vCPUs at all, so I'm not sure how this is a useful comparison. The question of IPC performance is an interesting one. We've been building up a database of open source results that show wildly diverging results on different architectures. Surf through http://fable.io for it, or read this work in progress: http://anil.recoil.org/papers/drafts/2012-usenix-ipc-draft1.... h…
Comment linking /talks/fosdem-io-2012.pdf
on “My First Unikernel”Submitted Steps Towards an Ecology of the Internet as a story · 3 points
HN discussionRegarding GC pauses, remember that you already have them if your application stack is written in (Scala,Java,Go,OCaml,Haskell). But you also have other manual memory management going on everywhere! With Mirage, it's all amortised in one consistent, fast GC! To give you a sense of the malloc vs OCaml GC trade off, see http://anil.recoil.org/papers/2007-eurosys-melange.pdf Malloc and free list management is remarkably…
Comment linking /papers/2007-eurosys-melange.pdf
on “My First Unikernel”Submitted GeoTessera Python library released for geospatial embeddings as a story · 3 points
HN discussionFolks interested in this should also take note of the projects that target Xen [1,2 are ones I'm aware of]. Startup times that can be tuned to be on the order of 10s of milliseconds (see comment in Mirage paper). [1] Mirage - http://openmirage.org (paper at http://anil.recoil.org/papers/2013-asplos-mirage.pdf ) [2] Zerg - http://zerg.erlangonxen.org
Comment linking /papers/2013-asplos-mirage.pdf
on “Containers, Not Virtual Machines, Are the Future Cloud”Submitted Do not rule out nature from climate action; an open letter as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI was basing off of this CUFP report regarding Standard Chartered's use of Haskell. http://anil.recoil.org/papers/2011-cufp-scribe-preprint.pdf > Their experience with strict semantics has been positive. Particularly useful is the ease of obtaining meaningful stack traces, tracking resource usage, debugging and exception propagation. The chief downside of strict semantics, in their experience, is the increased diffi…
Comment linking /papers/2011-cufp-scribe-preprint.pdf
on “Exploring ReasonML and functional programming”Submitted Programming FPGAs Using OCaml as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
