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• Post #3205404

  Currently reading Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective (aka CS:APP). Let's see how far I can get before school starts!

• Post #3205403

  One downside of Chapter 3 from CS:APP is that it’s based on AMD64 assembly. I know it’s the best ISA for hands-on experience and thus suitable for labs, but the book wastes so many pages on explaining AMD64’s special cases. For example, any operation that touches lower 32-bit (l) of a register sets upper 32-bits to zeros, and the readers have to keep that on mind while reading the book. My personal preference would be RISC-V, but it wouldn’t be practical for a course that targets not only CS/C...

• Post #3205402

  Swift is the language that I had least issues so far: Javascript: cjs/ejs, node/browser, npm/pnpm/yarn/bun, nvm/fnm, webpack/vite, pure JS/JSDoc/TS, and much more. Sometimes dev tools become bottlenecks, not the actual code. Python: Lack of good type checking. Mypy doesn’t always work when combined with other libraries. Performance issue due to GIL. pip3/poetry/uv, setup.py/hatchling/uv-build, black/flake8/ruff, etc. Again, too many dev tools out there. The issue with JS/Python dev tools is t...

• Post #3205401

  I really wanted to finish Chapter 4 (Processor design) before leaving for university... but time's up! GG

• Post #3205400

  Great article on performance optimization on Swift programs! I don’t think the Swift language is necessarily slow compared to C (as the article says, it does better than C compiler for SIMD optimization), but it wants programmers to use advanced data structures such as inline array to match or beat C’s performance. https://www.cocoawithlove.com/blog/matrix-multiplications-swift.html

• Post #3205399

  I came to wrong university program. I thought Computer Engineering will be full of fun courses, but the reality is that they are just boring. Now looking back at the curriculum, I find that Mathematical Physics (BSc) is more interesting than CE. Computer Engineering has tuition of $19K/year. Mathematical Physics only has $9/year. This is ridiculous. At this point, I would transfer to Mathematical Physics as a regular program. Why not co-op option? Most of the co-op postings on WaterlooWorks a...

• Post #3205398

  No way Substack added code block right after I moved to Ghost. https://support.substack.com/hc/en-us/articles/46860260687380-How-do-I-embed-a-code-block-in-a-Substack-post

• Post #3205397

  I might transfer from computer engineering to mathematical physics (BSc) at uWaterloo. Currently 70% of chance doing it. After starting second term, I realized that programming as hobby and learning it for grades aren’t the same.

• Post #3205396

  A new coop student at the FreeBSD Foundation is working on porting ROCm to FreeBSD. We know that anything that involves the word “VM” (whether it’s virtual memory or virtual machine) is a fun thing to deal with! https://racha.ca/myPosts/ROCmFreeBSD_pt3.html

• Post #3205394

  Weekend TODO: - Catch up reading ECE 108 course notes (~50 pages) - ditto for ECE 140 course notes (~100 pages) - Review MATH 119 course notes (5 pages) - Do more investigation on the ULE scheduler - Finish BSDCan slides (should’ve finished this last week) Gotta be a busy weekend…

• Post #2382323

  Bought “The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System, 2:E” last year, but the third edition is coming later this year… Should’ve waited more. https://allanjude.com/publications/

• Post #1821429

  Just wrapped up my first co-op term as a Junior Software Developer Intern at the FreeBSD Foundation! Over the past four months, I worked on HMP scheduling (with a patch for the hmp(4) framework that I'll be presenting at BSDCan 2026) and brought LLDB kernel debugging much closer to feature parity with KGDB across FreeBSD's supported architectures — work that will ship in LLVM 23. Huge thanks to everyone at the Foundation, the FreeBSD Project, and the LLVM Project for their suppo...

• Post #755427

  My work on LLDB’s FreeBSDKernel plugin: https://minsoo.io/future-of-the-freebsd-kernel-lldb-plugin/ The name FreeBSDKernel will be changed to FreeBSD-core, since it only provides functionalities to examine core dumps. Traditional live kernel debugging is done through gdb-remote plugin with FreeBSD’s gdb stub.