Top all-time · #1062
Richard WM Jones
Personal blog · rwmj.wordpress.com · on HN as rwmjsystemsprogramming
Richard WM Jones's personal blog at rwmj.wordpress.com covers systems and programming. Since 2009, 63 different Hacker News readers have linked it 266 times, most often “Jonesforth Git Repository”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-02-26, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (21) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link his posts on Forth (the jonesforth literate implementation), OCaml, RISC-V and Linux, libguestfs, and the Windows Registry as a filesystem. Most links are cited as sources or pointers.
- Recommended for · 3 comments
- Jonesforth, read top to bottom, is said to explain Forth step by step; a Windows Registry post is called a good blogpost; another suggests reading a post on VMs
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 21 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Virtualization, tools and tips
Most-linked posts?
- Jonesforth Git Repository8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2015-04-14
- Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010)7 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2018-05-09
- A beginners guide to OCaml internals3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2009-08-05
- On the awesomeness of ocaml-bitstring3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-12-07
- How many disks can you add to a (virtual) Linux machine?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-04-26
- Which foreign function interface is the best?3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2011-09-22
- Frame pointers vs. DWARF – my verdict2 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2023-02-14
- Goals – an experimental new tool which generalizes “make”2 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2020-01-14
- Virtual machine inspection, now with added Prolog2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-12-06
- Creating a modifiable gzipped disk image2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-12-01
What Hacker News says?
The RPi 4 has USB 3 + UAS which is actually quite decent. I use it for Aarch64 development[1]. It boots and runs entirely off the SSD, and the performance is not spectacular but perfectly usable, and being it's a regular SSD it should be at least as reliable as a laptop. It also has a firmware bug where it cannot boot unless there is an (empty, unused) SD card in the slot, which is annoying! [1] https://rwmj.wordpre…
Comment linking /2020/09/24/raspberry-pi-4-running-fedora-32/
on “Raspberry Pi 400 Desktop PC”Submitted Why the Windows Registry sucks technically (2010) as a story · 418 points
HN discussionIt's even older than 02007! You could put your filesystem on a ramdisk in CP/M in 01979 if you bought a third-party utility, though this needed bank-switched RAM to be really useful in CP/M: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon_Disk_System Dataram used to sell RAMdisks ("BULK CORE") for PDP-11s starting in 01976, but those were hardware devices, so maybe we shouldn't count them. See First also sold them. I'm not aw…
Comment linking /2020/06/15/compressed-ram-disks/
on “I spent 5 years writing my own operating system”Submitted Fedora/RISC-V reaches initial goal as a story · 154 points
HN discussion> I am fascinated by Forth, but every time I've tried to learn it I haven't really "got it". Try reading Jonesforth, a literate Forth implementation in one x86 assembly file and one Forth file. You can read it top to bottom and it will explain how everything works step-by-step. https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2010/08/07/jonesforth-git-reposit... Github mirror: https://github.com/nornagon/jonesforth
Comment linking /2010/08/07/jonesforth-git-repository/
on “Advent of Code 2021”Submitted Why the Windows Registry sucks … technically as a story · 123 points
HN discussionThose are numbers from 7 years ago, so they're beginning to get a bit stale as people start to put more weight behind having frame pointers and make upstream contributions to their compilers to improve their output. People put it at <1% from much more recent testing by the very R.W.M. Jones you're replying to [0] and separate testing by others like Brendan Gregg [1b], whose post this is commenting on (and included […
Comment linking /2023/02/14/frame-pointers-vs-dwarf-my-verdict/
on “The return of the frame pointers”Submitted Tmpfs considered harmful as a story · 89 points
HN discussionThe downside is it doesn't work at all: https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2023/02/14/frame-pointers-vs-dwar...
Comment linking /2023/02/14/frame-pointers-vs-dwarf-my-verdict/
on “The return of the frame pointers”Submitted Virtual machine inspection, now with added Prolog as a story · 78 points
HN discussionDWARF unwinding isn't practical: https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2023/02/14/frame-pointers-vs-dwar...
Comment linking /2023/02/14/frame-pointers-vs-dwarf-my-verdict/
on “The return of the frame pointers”Submitted Writing a Planner to solve a tricky programming optimization problem as a story · 62 points
HN discussionNo one in the thread has mentioned it yet, but NBD is also an option, either NBD root or NBD for particular filesystems. I've used it for managing Pis and a couple of SiFive boards. It has different trade-offs from NFS (not necessarily faster/slower/better/worse, depends on what you're doing). For what I'm doing which is software builds I was able to write a specific NBD driver[1] for this task which has quite large…
Comment linking /2020/03/21/new-nbdkit-remote-tmpfs-tmpdisk-plugin/
on “Raspberry Pi 4 can finally boot directly from USB”Submitted Why is virt-builder written in OCaml? as a story · 60 points
HN discussionFrom 2011: https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2011/10/03/when-will-disk-sizes-g... nbdkit can emulate disks up to 2^63-1 which is also the same maximum size that the Linux kernel currently supports: https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2018/09/05/nbdkit-for-loopback-pt... https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2018/09/06/nbdkit-for-loopback-pt...
Comment linking /2018/09/06/nbdkit-for-loopback-pt-6-giant-file-backed-disks-for-testing/
on “Backblaze Drive Stats for 2024”Submitted Using LVM’s new cache feature as a story · 57 points
HN discussionAnd for completeness, miniexpect which is a small C library implementing the same sort of thing: https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2014/04/25/miniexpect-a-small-exp... $ wc -l miniexpect.[ch] 489 miniexpect.c 110 miniexpect.h
Comment linking /2014/04/25/miniexpect-a-small-expect-library-for-c/
on “Moreutils: A collection of Unix tools that nobody thought to write long ago”Submitted A beginners guide to OCaml internals as a story · 30 points
HN discussionThe best demo I've found, also 256 bytes, is Pyrit by Řrřola (Jan Kadlec, a Czech developer). It's frankly incredible, something I wouldn't have believed was possible: https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=78045 I ported it to a boot sector so you can run it with a single (rather long!) Linux command line in qemu: https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2019/12/08/pyrit-by-rrrola-incred... The source code for Pyrit is worth readi…
Comment linking /2019/12/08/pyrit-by-rrrola-incredible-raytracing-demo-as-a-qemu-bootable-disk-image/
on “Memories – 256 bytes demo winner of Revision 2020”Submitted My rant about Haskell as a story · 25 points
HN discussionI had a go at making an experimental tool with a better syntax, fixing a lot of the obvious problems (whitespace, $ having a double meaning, etc). https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2020/01/14/goals-an-experimental-...
Comment linking /2020/01/14/goals-an-experimental-new-tool-which-generalizes-make/
on “Debian Running on Rust Coreutils”Submitted Lisp, erlang, forth, scheme, prolog, ML maintainer(s) needed urgently in Fedora as a story · 25 points
HN discussionBefore I got my Mustang (:-) I was hacking on the OCaml arm64 compiler backend using this technique. The article describes setting it up for Fedora. Follow through the links for how to do this on SUSE and Debian. It's fairly reasonable as a userspace dev environment. http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2013/12/22/how-to-run-aarch64-bina...
Comment linking /2013/12/22/how-to-run-aarch64-binaries-on-an-x86-64-host-using-qemu-userspace-emulation/
on “Nexus 9”Submitted New in Libguestfs: Rewriting Bits of the Daemon in OCaml as a story · 19 points
HN discussionI think this was the first line of the forth in the library of an older version of jonesforth ( https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2010/08/07/jonesforth-git-reposit... ), but now I can only find it in my port: : \ IMMEDIATE #IB @ >IN ! ; \ We can now comment! Implementing a forth system is unbelievably fun because of gems like this.
Comment linking /2010/08/07/jonesforth-git-repository/
on “Ask HN: What is the most beautiful piece of code you've ever read?”Submitted Half-baked idea: Standard machine readable output for command line programs as a story · 12 points
HN discussionYours is a lot neater than the four node bare cluster I built a few years ago: https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2014/04/28/caseless-virtualizatio... One issue with caseless machines is the amount of RF they emit. Makes it hard to listen to any broadcast radio near one and probably disturbs the neighbours similarly. I'm now using a cluster of NUCs which is considerably easier to deal with although quite a lot more expensiv…
Comment linking /2018/02/06/nuc-cluster-bring-up/
on “Everything I know about Kubernetes I learned from a cluster of Raspberry Pis”Submitted Don't use release candidates as a story · 8 points
HN discussionWhat fully open integrated circuit of any kind can you buy? Maybe there exist simple 74xx chips with completely open designs, taped out using open source tools, manufactured using completely transparent processes, and then independently verified to prevent backdoors? I'm not aware of any, but I suppose the military have something like this. Anyway depending on your level of trust at the moment you could: * Download…
Comment linking /tag/icestorm/
on “India's first RISC-V based Chip is Here: Linux boots on Shakti processor”Submitted A new Amazon seller scam as a story · 6 points
HN discussion
