Top all-time · #4432
Core Dumped
Personal blog · coredumped.dev · on HN as celeritasceleryprogrammingsystems
Core Dumped is a personal blog at coredumped.dev about programming and systems. Since 2021, 17 different Hacker News readers have linked it 37 times, most often “Design of Emacs in Rust”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-06-18, 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 Core Dumped for posts on runtime and data-structure internals, such as gap buffers versus ropes in text editors and Lua virtual machine design. Comments mostly cite or link the posts without judging them.
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.
A core dump of ideas and projects
Most-linked posts?
- Design of Emacs in Rust5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-01-17
- Implementing a safe garbage collector in Rust3 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2022-04-12
- Text Showdown: Gap Buffers vs. Ropes3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-10-09
- Building an Emacs Lisp VM in Rust3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-10-21
- A vision of a multi-threaded Emacs3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-05-30
- What is the best pointer tagging method?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-09-09
- Cycles All Way Down2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2024-02-23
- Making TRAMP faster2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-06-23
What Hacker News says?
emacs still does this IIUC. The beating heart of the emacs edit model is a "gap buffer" at the cursor. There's a neat compare-and-contrast someone did awhile back on the gap buffer approach vs. the other approach often taken for code IDEs ("ropes"). The tl;dr is that gap buffers are actually really performant for a lot of cases except for having to edit at a lot of randomly-chosen cursor points far apart from each o…
Comment linking /2023/08/09/text-showdown-gap-buffers-vs-ropes/
on “Subroutine calls in the ancient world, before computers had stacks or heaps”Submitted Making TRAMP faster as a story · 228 points
HN discussionhttps://coredumped.dev/2025/06/18/making-tramp-go-brrrr./
Comment linking /2025/06/18/making-tramp-go-brrrr./
on “VSCode's SSH Agent Is Bananas (2025)”Submitted A vision of a multi-threaded Emacs as a story · 172 points
HN discussionOne of my favorite things about logseq is that it supports org-mode markup syntax. I use it for talking org notes on the go https://coredumped.dev/2021/05/26/taking-org-roam-everywhere...
Comment linking /2021/05/26/taking-org-roam-everywhere-with-logseq/
on “Logseq: Privacy-First, Joyful Platform for Knowledge Management”Submitted Building an Emacs Lisp VM in Rust as a story · 133 points
HN discussiongap buffer performs surprisingly well vs rope https://coredumped.dev/2023/08/09/text-showdown-gap-buffers-...
Comment linking /2023/08/09/text-showdown-gap-buffers-vs-ropes/
on “Text Editor: Data Structures”Submitted Implementing a safe garbage collector in Rust as a story · 128 points
HN discussionNot OP, but I recently wrote about solving this problem in my interpreter[1]. Essentially using a combination of LCell (compile time interior mutability) and taking a shared reference to the GC as you suggest. [1] https://coredumped.dev/2022/04/11/implementing-a-safe-garbag...
Comment linking /2022/04/11/implementing-a-safe-garbage-collector-in-rust/
on “Show HN: I'm making a dynamic language in Rust”Submitted What is the best pointer tagging method? as a story · 115 points
HN discussionI wrote a blog post about integrating org-roam with logseq [1]. Unfortunately this doesn’t work with the the new V2 org-roam update, so I am sticking with V1 for now. [1] https://coredumped.dev/2021/05/26/taking-org-roam-everywhere...
Comment linking /2021/05/26/taking-org-roam-everywhere-with-logseq/
on “Org-roam-UI – graphical front end for exploring your org-roam Zettelkasten”Submitted Bump Allocation: Up or Down? as a story · 103 points
HN discussionThis is a pet interest of mine for decades. Did you run any of this under perf and check where the time is going? This may be too simple (too regular) to show it, but the biggest issue with all of these is that the branch predictor doesn't have enough context to make good predictions and you end up mispredicting a lot. This paper https://www.cs.toronto.edu/~matz/dissertation/matzDissertati... (found the reference in…
Comment linking /2021/10/21/building-an-emacs-lisp-vm-in-rust
on “Writing a minimal Lua implementation with a virtual machine from scratch in Rust”Submitted A vision of a multi-threaded Emacs (2022) as a story · 93 points
HN discussionI talk little bit about that in my introductory post[1]. Basically my interest in Emacs, Rust, and interpreters came to together and I decided to see what I could do. I was also inspired by the remacs project[2] and I think Rust has a lot to offer as dynamic language backend. I don't know where this will go, but I am going to continue to work on it. [1] https://coredumped.dev/2021/10/21/building-an-emacs-lisp-vm-...…
Comment linking /2021/10/21/building-an-emacs-lisp-vm-in-rust/
on “Implementing a safe garbage collector in Rust”Submitted Implementing a safe garbage collector in Rust as a story · 26 points
HN discussionI wrote some comparisons here https://coredumped.dev/2023/08/09/text-showdown-gap-buffers-...
Comment linking /2023/08/09/text-showdown-gap-buffers-vs-ropes/
on “Ask HN: If you were rewriting Emacs from scratch, what would you do differently?”Submitted Building an Emacs Lisp VM in rust as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI have actually done some work on a rewrite of the Emacs core in rust[1], so I have thought a lot about this question. Most of the things you would want to change could be fairly easily added to the existing Emacs. The biggest ones that are hard to do with the current core is concurrency and collaborative editing. My particular core is focused on concurrency[2]. Unlike a lot of commenters here, I am trying to stay b…
Comment linking /2022/05/19/a-vision-of-a-multi-threaded-emacs/
on “Ask HN: If you were rewriting Emacs from scratch, what would you do differently?”Submitted What is the best pointer tagging method? as a story · 4 points
HN discussionInteresting write up. I am curious about the usage of this framework. One thing in reference counting’s favor is that it is hard to screw up. You just use the rc type and when it is no longer accessible it will magically get freed. That is how GC works in a high level language too, you almost never need to think about it. Let’s look at the example from the docs: SWL_GCArena gc = swl_gc_arena_new(<starting-capacity>)…
Comment linking /2022/04/11/implementing-a-safe-garbage-collector-in-rust/
on “Tracing garbage collection for arenas”Submitted Cycles All Way Down as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI have a few questions about the garbage collection. One of the hard parts of implementing a garbage collector is making sure everything is properly rooted (especially with a moving collector). you have the `do_garbage_collection` method marked unsafe[1], but don't explain what the calling code needs to do to ensure it is safe to call. How do you ensure all references to the heap are rooted? This is not a trivial pr…
Comment linking /2022/04/11/implementing-a-safe-garbage-collector-in-rust/
on “I have written a JVM in Rust”Submitted Building an Emacs Lisp VM in Rust as a story · 4 points
HN discussionhttps://coredumped.dev/ Mostly Emacs and Rust, but anything I find interesting
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?”Submitted Design of Emacs in Rust as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThis makes me wonder if I should be writing on substack. I currently use a static site generator and host with netlify[1]. This is great because it is simple and I have complete control over the site. But at the same time I can’t see when people visit my site and there is no comment section. I rely or external forums like HN, lobsters, and Reddit to have a discussion. And I have no way of knowing when my content get…
Comment linking /
on “A blog post is a long and complex search query to find people”Submitted What is the best pointer tagging method? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Cycles All the Way Down as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Design of Emacs in Rust as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
