Top all-time · #2077
Arseny Kapoulkine
Personal blog · zeux.iogamesprogramming
Arseny Kapoulkine's personal blog at zeux.io covers games and programming. Since 2019, 38 different Hacker News readers have linked it 71 times, most often “Is C++ Fast?”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-30, and you can follow it by feed.
Most-linked posts?
- Is C++ Fast?6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-02-29
- Eight Years at Roblox6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2020-08-03
- Qgrep Internals5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-04-21
- On Proebsting's Law4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2022-01-08
- Efficient Jagged Arrays4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-07-01
- Writing an Efficient Vulkan Renderer4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-02-29
- Billions of Triangles in Minutes3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-09-30
- Year of Independence3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-01-01
- Measuring Acceleration Structures3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-04-01
- Condvars and atomics do not mix3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-03-24
What Hacker News says?
> Doubt ripgrep it will beat indexing, line GNU id-utils. (mkid to build ID file, lid to query). Does it provide the same user experience? i.e., Does it keep the index up to date for you automatically? If so, that's something a lot of users aren't willing to pay for. If you want a pre-indexed solution, I'd recommend checking out qgrep instead: https://zeux.io/2019/04/20/qgrep-internals/ > If you're using git, "git g…
Comment linking /2019/04/20/qgrep-internals/
on “How FZF and ripgrep improved my workflow”Submitted Eight Years at Roblox as a story · 287 points
HN discussionIf anyone wants to read an interesting technical article about Roblox, this "Eight Years at Roblox" one from August was excellent: https://zeux.io/2020/08/02/eight-years-at-roblox/
Comment linking /2020/08/02/eight-years-at-roblox/
on “Roblox S-1”Submitted Load-Store Conflicts as a story · 117 points
HN discussion> To kill the thread, set the stop flag and cond_signal the condvar This is a race condition. When you "spin" on a condition variable, the stop flag you check must be guarded by the same mutex you give to cond_wait. See this article for a thorough explanation: https://zeux.io/2024/03/23/condvars-atomic/
Comment linking /2024/03/23/condvars-atomic/
on “How to stop Linux threads cleanly”Submitted X is justifiably slow (2022) as a story · 115 points
HN discussionFantastic article from the inside looking out: https://zeux.io/2020/08/02/eight-years-at-roblox/
Comment linking /2020/08/02/eight-years-at-roblox/
on “Roblox pays 26% of its revenue to Apple/Google for payment processing”Submitted Writing an Efficient Vulkan Renderer as a story · 110 points
HN discussion1. Arrays ≠ Everything. Please stop with the straw men. 2. "Compiler Advances Double Computing Power Every 50 Years, And The Interval Keeps Growing". (i.e. even Probsting was wildly optimistic when it comes to the benefits of compiler research). The benefits of these shenanigans are much less than even the critics thought, never mind what the advocates claim. They are actually small and shrinking. https://zeux.io/20…
Comment linking /2022/01/08/on-proebstings-law/
on “ISO C became unusable for operating systems development”Submitted Writing an efficient Vulkan renderer (2020) as a story · 82 points
HN discussionNot necessarily, since it's in production they might be hoping for a bit of securty-by-obscurity if they haven't had time to get an audit the code (runtimes are always hard to get 100% correct since they're so generic, esp for a language such as Lua). Seems like this runtime was announced to Roblox developers almost a year ago. But i don't think they've put much thought or effort into open sourcing it and it just ha…
Comment linking /2020/08/02/eight-years-at-roblox/
on “Luau – A fast, small, safe, gradually typed scripting language derived from Lua”Submitted Measuring Acceleration Structures as a story · 79 points
HN discussionin the "closing thoughts" [1] of the OP article there's a pointer to "Proebstrings law" [2] which got me to a benchmark [3] how LLVM has improved over 10 years from 2.7 to 11 which leaves me with the strong intuition that indeed what mit benefit more from a rethink is not optimizers but focus on programmer productivity > Perhaps this means Programming Language Research should be concentrating on something other than…
Comment linking /2022/01/08/on-proebstings-law/
on “Optimizers need a rethink”Submitted Qgrep Internals as a story · 74 points
HN discussionUsing the STL is a non-issue for me as it is almost never used in the video games industry, mostly for performance reasons. In my opinion the STL is still a big, bloated, unreadable piece of code with a few badly implemented good ideas (containers) You should read this article: https://zeux.io/2019/01/17/is-c-fast/
Comment linking /2019/01/17/is-c-fast/
on “The Little Things: Speeding up C++ compilation”Submitted #include <rules> (2010) as a story · 68 points
HN discussionIf this[1] article is to be believed, STL can also perform poorly in a debug build. [1] https://zeux.io/2019/01/17/is-c-fast/
Comment linking /2019/01/17/is-c-fast/
on “Why I’m Using C”Submitted Three Years of Metal (2019) as a story · 66 points
HN discussionI'm shocked there's so much push back on this here. This was written in 2019 but it applies even more so today. All the recent advances in AI for the past decade have, as a base requirement, massive amounts of compute. Not a proof but it should be a big red flag that if you don't believe Sutton, you should maybe consider. Put it this way. Do you believe premature optimization is the root of all evil? Then why do you…
Comment linking /2022/01/08/on-proebstings-law/
on “Bitter Lesson by Richard Sutton”Submitted Billions of triangles redux as a story · 54 points
HN discussionWhy would you respond to my post but ignore all the points I made? Do you just want to rant? I explained why it doesn't matter that "C lacks basic primitives...". C has the basic primitives. It lacks generalist containers, for example. But most of those 'generalist containers' are, as I already explained, just not very good. For example, take this post: https://zeux.io/2023/06/30/efficient-jagged-arrays/ What do we…
Comment linking /2023/06/30/efficient-jagged-arrays/
on “Should we stop writing functions? (C++)”Submitted Condvars and atomics do not mix as a story · 38 points
HN discussion> [Optimization not comparable to C++] Hmm...considering Proebsting's Law[1], which is always shown to be too optimistic despite its pessimism[2][3], the arguments presented by DJ Bernstein[4] and the fact that Frances Allen got all the good ones in 1971 [5], etc. not sure how much this matters outside a few specialised domains. [1] http://proebsting.cs.arizona.edu/law.html [2] https://gwern.net/docs/cs/algorithm/20…
Comment linking /2022/01/08/on-proebstings-law/
on “Oberon-2, a hi-performance alternative to C++ (1997)”Submitted On Proebsting's Law as a story · 28 points
HN discussionSubmitted Optimizations That Aren't as a story · 19 points
HN discussionSubmitted Measuring Acceleration Structures as a story · 18 points
HN discussionSubmitted Billions of Triangles in Minutes as a story · 15 points
HN discussionSubmitted LLM Inference Speed of Light as a story · 14 points
HN discussionSubmitted Eight Years at Roblox as a story · 8 points
HN discussionSubmitted Qgrep Internals as a story · 5 points
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