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Bobby Holley
Personal blog · bholley.net/blogprogrammingsystems
Bobby Holley writes bholley, a personal blog at bholley.net about programming and systems. Since 2015, 14 different Hacker News readers have linked it 20 times, most often “Must be this tall to write multi-threaded code (2015)”. The last post was in 2017, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (14) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Bobby Holley's blog mainly for 'Must be this tall to write multi-threaded code', cited whenever concurrency comes up, and for posts on Mozilla's Stylo CSS engine and Servo.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 14 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Bobby Holley - Mozilla Hacker & Everything Else.
Most-linked posts?
- Must be this tall to write multi-threaded code (2015)6 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2022-06-09
- On the Right Fix, and Why the Bugzilla Breach Made Me Proud3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-02-19
- /blog/2017/stylo.html3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2018-08-16
What Hacker News says?
JavaScript has multiple ways to blueprint objects, yes, but that isn't really what GP stated. I consider the class keyword as way more beneficial than just being for "trendchasers and worshippers". The only pitfall with async/await is all the existing I/O-intensive code where blocking your runtime wasn't seen as a problem that waisted unnecessary resources (yet). Must be This Tall to Write Multi-Threaded Code [0] co…
Comment linking /blog/2015/must-be-this-tall-to-write-multi-threaded-code.html
on “Cognitive load is what matters”Submitted How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox as a story · 639 points
HN discussionBobby (the Mozilla rep) was also heavily involved with Servo and Rust-in-Firefox, see e.g. https://bholley.net/blog/2017/stylo.html
Comment linking /blog/2017/stylo.html
on “Rust Foundation: Hello, World”Submitted Must Be This Tall to Write Multi-Threaded Code as a story · 146 points
HN discussionThis is an easy benchmark for rejecting a lot of selectors: http://bholley.net/testcases/style-perf-tests/perf-reftest/b... Firefox with STYLO_THREADS=1 gets about 160ms on my machine, which is basically parity with safari and chrome. With the parallelism, Firefox gets 40ms. :-) You can also simulate sequential mode in recent nightlies by ctrl-clicking and loading the tab in the background (we disable parallelism fo…
Comment linking /testcases/style-perf-tests/perf-reftest/bloom-basic.html
on “Inside a fast CSS engine”Submitted Must be this tall to write multi-threaded code (2015) as a story · 144 points
HN discussionI led the Stylo project to integrate Servo's CSS engine into Firefox as part of project Quantum [1]. I have the utmost respect for the engineers on the Servo team, and am sad to see them go (though I am certain they will have no shortage of opportunities as to what to work on next). Servo had two major roles within Mozilla - as an incubator for novel browser technology we wanted to ship in Firefox, and more recently…
Comment linking /blog/2017/stylo.html
on “What's the future of Servo?”Submitted MozPromise: A Better Tool for Asynchronous C++ as a story · 16 points
HN discussionAn example is "Slaughterhouse" (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=929539 and http://bholley.net/blog/2016/the-right-fix.html ). This is not the only incident where Mozilla people have suggested hiding bugs until an old ESR goes end of life BTW.
Comment linking /blog/2016/the-right-fix.html
on ““Our primary goal is to un-fork the Tor Browser””Submitted On the Right Fix, and Why the Bugzilla Breach Made Me Proud as a story · 4 points
HN discussionLooking at what it takes to actually implement the "belly of the beast" from scratch, I don't blame them. (Also, after seeing the below 350-line function that's part of a 3113-line file, I now know that whenever I'm yelling at CSS layout behaving weirdly, there's someone with a much, much more frustrating job.) https://github.com/servo/servo/blob/master/components/layout... EDIT: for anyone who doesn't know, https:/…
Comment linking /blog/2017/stylo.html
on “China’s first ‘fully homegrown’ web browser found to be Google Chrome clone”Submitted On the Right Fix, and Why the Bugzilla Breach Made Me Proud as a story · 2 points
HN discussionYou're not the only one. David Baron's note certainly applies: https://bholley.net/blog/2015/must-be-this-tall-to-write-mul... In a language conceived for this kind of work it's not as easy as you'd like. In most languages you're going to write nonsense which has no coherent meaning whatsoever. Experiments show that humans can't successfully understand non-trivial programs unless they exhibit Sequential Consistency…
Comment linking /blog/2015/must-be-this-tall-to-write-multi-threaded-code.html
on “The first year of free-threaded Python”Does it have "Slaughterhouse" (see https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=929539 and http://bholley.net/blog/2016/the-right-fix.html ) ? This is not the only incident where Mozilla people have suggested hiding bugs until an old ESR goes end of life BTW.
Comment linking /blog/2016/the-right-fix.html
on ““I've been working at Mozilla for many years, from peak to decline””I hear you have to be pretty tall to be able to do it right. [1] [1] https://bholley.net/blog/2015/must-be-this-tall-to-write-mul...
Comment linking /blog/2015/must-be-this-tall-to-write-multi-threaded-code.html
on “What every systems programmer should know about concurrency (2020) [pdf]”Mozilla had this famous sign 8ft up on the wall that said “you must be this tall to write multi-threaded code”[1]. A lot of people will claim to be able to master it. The track record shows that even the superhuman domain experts make mistakes frequently, as it’s almost impossible to reason about, verify, debug and importantly maintain the invariants as code evolves. And good luck predicting performance implications…
Comment linking /blog/2015/must-be-this-tall-to-write-multi-threaded-code.html
on “Making Sense of Acquire-Release Semantics”> Multithreading can be hard https://bholley.net/blog/2015/must-be-this-tall-to-write-mul...
Comment linking /blog/2015/must-be-this-tall-to-write-multi-threaded-code.html
on “The State of SSL Stacks”This reminds me of this poster: "You must be this tall..." https://bholley.net/blog/2015/must-be-this-tall-to-write-mul... Back about a decade ago I was "auditing" someone else's threaded code. And couldn't figure it out. But he was the company's "golden child" so by default it must be working code because he wrote it. And then it started causing deadlocks in prod. "What do you want me to do about it? It's the golde…
Comment linking /blog/2015/must-be-this-tall-to-write-multi-threaded-code.html
on “PostgreSQL reconsiders its process-based model”I don't think it's fair to say C++ is safe and reliable as is. The only way it could be made safe is with a restricted version of C++. I'm reminded by mozilla's sign "You must be this tall to write threaded code." [1] How much do you restrict your language and libraries to make it safe? Like custom templates? How do you define ownership of objects and lifetimes -- or just malloc everything all at once? [1] https://b…
Comment linking /blog/2015/must-be-this-tall-to-write-multi-threaded-code.html
on “Ada and SPARK enter the automotive ISO-26262 market with Nvidia”If I were younger you would have triggered my impostor syndrome, but as a man of wisdom I know that you (a) have super-human skills[1] nobody else has, or (b) you’re talking about something different. Note I’m not talking about an isolated case of analyzing a concurrent snippet of code for happens-before relationships, but rather how to write highly concurrent code within large scale applications, without runaway co…
Comment linking /blog/2015/must-be-this-tall-to-write-multi-threaded-code.html
on “An Introduction to Lockless Algorithms”
