Top all-time · #454
neugierig.org
Personal blog · neugierig.org · on HN as evmarprogrammingsystems
neugierig.org is a personal blog at neugierig.org about programming and systems. Since 2007, 125 different Hacker News readers have linked it 245 times, most often “Iron claims to be a "privacy-oriented" fork of Chrome...”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Rarely recommended · 5 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Evan Martin's neugierig.org for deep technical posts on Chrome internals, binary size, WebKit contributions, and build systems such as Ninja. Commenters value it for Google-internals detail and for explaining why Chrome and Ninja work the way they do.
- Recommended for · 5 comments
- One commenter calls the blog a gold mine: digestible writing with a peek inside Google's internals. Another calls a post a great read, and a third says it is a
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Iron claims to be a "privacy-oriented" fork of Chrome...9 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2009-12-30
- Why not add an option for that? (2018)7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2018-07-09
- Chrome Binary Size6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2010-09-20
- Chromium Notes: Ninja, a new build system5 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2011-02-06
- The Jujutsu version control system5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2024-12-12
- Chromium Notes: The zygote process and software updates4 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2011-08-04
- Google overcomes Apple in Webkit Commits4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2010-02-07
- Some things I've learned about memory4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2012-01-07
- C-REPL4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2008-08-27
- The Success and Failure of Ninja4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-05-12
What Hacker News says?
You'll uninstall Iron after you've read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRWare_Iron "Although SRWare claims 'Iron is free and OpenSource' ... Iron 'is entirely closed source and has been since at least version 6'." Or this: http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2009/12/iron.ht...
Comment linking /software/chromium/notes/2009/12/iron.html
on “Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox”Submitted TypeScript at Google as a story · 494 points
HN discussionI wouldn't recommend Iron. http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2009/12/iron.ht...
Comment linking /software/chromium/notes/2009/12/iron.html
on “Fuck It, I'm Going Back to Firefox”Submitted Leaving Google as a story · 478 points
HN discussionI worked on exactly this problem for Chrome! I agree with all your major points -- in particular, optimizing incremental builds is the most important thing for developer sanity. Here's a post about what I did: http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2011/02/ninja.h...
Comment linking /software/chromium/notes/2011/02/ninja.html
on “24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse”Submitted The success and failure of Ninja (2020) as a story · 297 points
HN discussionMy goto project is a terminal emulator, for reasons I went into here: http://neugierig.org/software/blog/2016/07/terminal-emulator... (summary: it touches a surprising breadth of details!)
Comment linking /software/blog/2016/07/terminal-emulators.html
on “Challenging projects every programmer should try”Submitted The Success and Failure of Ninja as a story · 209 points
HN discussionReminds me of something I once read on Evan Martin's (creator of the Ninja build system) blog [1]. "Underspecifying and overspecifying. Ninja executes commands in parallel, so it requires the user to provide enough information to get that correct. But at the other extreme, it also doesn't mandate that it has a complete picture of the build. You can see one discussion of this dynamic in this bug in particular (search…
Comment linking /software/blog/2020/05/ninja.html
on “Git's list of banned C functions”Submitted Why Not Haskell? as a story · 200 points
HN discussionFor Chrome we had to go through a lot of extra effort to make updates not break us. http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2011/08/zygote....
Comment linking /software/chromium/notes/2011/08/zygote.html
on “Microsoft disables Spectre mitigations as Intel’s patches cause instability”Submitted Retrowin32, a Win32 emulator as a story · 196 points
HN discussionhttp://neugierig.org/software/blog/ http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/
Comment linking /software/chromium/notes/
on “Ask HN: What programming blogs do you read daily?”Submitted Notes on WebAssembly as a story · 158 points
HN discussiondon't use Iron http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2009/12/iron.ht...
Comment linking /software/chromium/notes/2009/12/iron.html
on “UnGoogled Chromium: Chromium with enhanced privacy, control and transparency”Submitted The Jujutsu version control system as a story · 140 points
HN discussionThere's no secret sauce. The typical aphorisms of software development are generally correct and apply here: * internalize the cost of core changes and don't push them downstream unless you have a really good reason * staff a core team to take care of high ROI horizontal efforts that have high fixed cost to do efficiently, e.g. TypeScript migration of a massive codebase * be careful of what you take on * complexity…
Comment linking /software/blog/
on “Leaving Google”Submitted Chromium Notes: Ninja, a new build system as a story · 130 points
HN discussionBe sure to also read this link he mentions: http://neugierig.org/software/blog/2018/09/typescript-at-goo... There you will get a clear view of why you DO NOT want to become a frontend developper at Google. (plus the dilemna of maintaining internal tools).
Comment linking /software/blog/2018/09/typescript-at-google.html
on “Leaving Google”Submitted React, JSX, and CoffeeScript as a story · 123 points
HN discussionIn a separate context I discovered the slow performance of addr2line and wrote my own faster one as a learning experiment: http://neugierig.org/software/blog/2012/03/heap-profiling.ht...
Comment linking /software/blog/2012/03/heap-profiling.html
on “60x speed-up of Linux “perf””Submitted Taking a Break as a story · 119 points
HN discussionI don't recall measuring it in particular. Some thoughts on it anyway: 1. Even if you take a single binary and split it into multiple objects, you still must do the same "linking" work of resolving where functions point to. It's just that work is done as part of startup, at runtime, by the dynamic loader. I have seen (in other contexts) splitting up a big C++ binary into multiple pieces dramatically impact startup t…
Comment linking /software/chromium/notes/2009/04/perf.html
on “Zig's New Relationship with LLVM”Submitted Chrome Binary Size as a story · 116 points
HN discussionAt one point I got Chrome (a genuinely massive C++ project) to compile+link in under six seconds: http://neugierig.org/software/chromium/notes/2011/02/ninja.h... One of the big tricks not mentioned there is to decompose the app into multiple .so files (only when debugging -- release is still a single binary), so that you don't need to rebuild files unaffected by your incremental changes. I wrote more about that here…
Comment linking /software/blog/2012/07/gyp-toc.html
on “Zig's New Relationship with LLVM”Submitted WebAssembly and C++ as a story · 115 points
HN discussionThey wrote: "The TypeScript compiler could theoretically perform bundle optimizations based on types and you are missing on that by having a separate emitter and type checker." Actually, this isn't true, and it's a fundamental property of TypeScript. It's actually the secret to being a TypeScript wizard, and the more you internalize it, the more questions about TypeScript you can answer in advance. I go through some…
Comment linking /software/blog/2016/04/typescript-types.html
on “Porting 30K lines of code from Flow to TypeScript”Submitted Chromium Notes: Moonlight vs IcedTea as a story · 91 points
HN discussionI did a little experiment with this here: https://neugierig.org/software/blog/2023/01/compiling-advent...
Comment linking /software/blog/2023/01/compiling-advent.html
on “LLM4Decompile: Decompiling Binary Code with LLM”Submitted Interfaces Generally Belong with Users as a story · 89 points
HN discussion
