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Blog of Christine @pithlessly
Personal blog · pithlessly.github.ioprogrammingmath
Blog of Christine @pithlessly is a personal blog at pithlessly.github.io about programming and math. Since 2021, 6 different Hacker News readers have linked it 8 times, most often “Allocgate: Restructuring how allocators work in Zig”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-12-26, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN commenters link this post to explain Zig's allocator design, including the vtable struct that allows devirtualization, and the allocator API change that forced updates to code such as Bun's.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Allocgate: Restructuring how allocators work in Zig3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-12-15
- 1M for Non-Specialists: Introduction2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-12-30
What Hacker News says?
I believe that the language designers did some experimentation and designed the vtable struct so that calls to it can often be devirtualized. See this blog article for more details https://pithlessly.github.io/allocgate.html
Comment linking /allocgate.html
on “Perfecting WebGPU/Dawn native graphics for Zig”Submitted Allocgate: Restructuring how allocators work in Zig as a story · 100 points
HN discussionNo, they changed the allocator API so everyone had to update their code, here's the story: https://pithlessly.github.io/allocgate.html
Comment linking /allocgate.html
on “Bun v1.0.0”Submitted Intensional Joy (a concatenative account of internal structure) as a story · 60 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Comptime Calculus for Zig as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted 1M for Non-Specialists: Introduction as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted There is room for imperfect fault isolation as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted 1M for Non-Specialists as a story · 1 points
HN discussion