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@bnjbvr
Personal blog · blog.benj.meprogrammingsystems
@bnjbvr is a personal blog at blog.benj.me about programming and systems. Since 2015, 11 different Hacker News readers have linked it 13 times, most often “Making calls to WebAssembly fast and implementing anyref”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-12, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (4) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for its WebAssembly and JavaScript internals posts, such as faster calls between the two and access to the host garbage collector, and for a Rust post on finding unused dependencies with cargo-machete.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 4 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Technical blog and random musings.
Most-linked posts?
- Making calls to WebAssembly fast and implementing anyref4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2018-07-04
- A primer on code generation in Cranelift3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-02-17
What Hacker News says?
The reason the switch is called that... "A new proposal has been made to the WebAssembly specification committee a few months ago: to add reference types to the type system. Reference types are a new way to represent a reference to any host values. In a Web environment, this means being capable of playing with JavaScript values within WebAssembly. This is a huge difference with the existing type system, which only c…
Comment linking /2018/07/04/mozilla-2018-faster-calls-and-anyref/
on “Calls between JavaScript and WebAssembly are finally fast”Submitted Making calls to WebAssembly fast and implementing anyref as a story · 68 points
HN discussionWhile searching for more information on a configuration value mentioned in the article (javascript.options.wasm_gc) I came across another article on the topic, which I also found interesting because it's a bit more technical: https://blog.benj.me/2018/07/04/mozilla-2018-faster-calls-an...
Comment linking /2018/07/04/mozilla-2018-faster-calls-and-anyref/
on “Calls between JavaScript and WebAssembly are finally fast”Submitted A primer on code generation in Cranelift as a story · 63 points
HN discussionOnly until the WebAssembly spec included access to the host GC: >>> there's already a very efficient, solidly tested, constantly improving garbage collector in your browser that uses all the possible dirty low-level tricks known to mankind, which is the GC being used for JavaScript. What if we could give you access to the garbage collector directly? https://blog.benj.me/2018/07/04/mozilla-2018-faster-calls-an...
Comment linking /2018/07/04/mozilla-2018-faster-calls-and-anyref/
on “Grain: A strongly-typed functional programming language for the modern web”Submitted Making asm.js/WebAssembly compilation more parallel in Firefox as a story · 8 points
HN discussionCopy over all the dependencies and then run something like this: https://blog.benj.me/2022/04/27/cargo-machete/
Comment linking /2022/04/27/cargo-machete/
on “Rust Module System Encourages Bad Practices”Submitted A primer on code generation in Cranelift as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Improving My GitHub Workflow as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Making asm.js/WebAssembly compilation more parallel in Firefox as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Getting Things Done: The Good Parts as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Primer on Code Generation in Cranelift as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Cranelift Codegen Primer as a story · 1 points
HN discussion