Viewing profile — gavinhoward

> Looks like operational transforms to me. Sort of. I add provenance, which helps properly identify collisions, and require a well-defined order by stacking [1] changelists. > The …

The best answer I have is for you to read the "History Model" section of that design doc through the "Implementing CRDTs" subsection.

When it comes to large assets, wasting large chunks of space is a problem. If your chunks are 64 kib average (from the Lore document), but changes only average 1 kib (which could b…

As someone who has thought a lot about VCS design [1] [2], the chunking approach is the wrong one and will still waste space. [1]: https://gavinhoward.com/uploads/designs/yore.md […

Because Git was faster. This mattered because speed is the killer feature [1], and speed is often seen by users as a proxy for reliability [2]. [1]: https://bdickason.com/posts/spe…

> At this point if your VCS isn't a layer above git plumbing, nobody gonna waste time using it. Probably true, but it's a shame because there are better ways of storing and process…

Okay, but if you combine the curried and tuple styles, and add a dash of runtime function pointers, you can solve the expression problem. [1] [1]: https://gavinhoward.com/2025/04/h…

Bram Cohen is awesome, but this feels a little bare. I've put much more thought into version control ([1]), including the use of CRDTs (search for "# History Model" and read throug…

> For instance, you might think that big tech engineers are being deliberately demoralized as part of an anti-labor strategy to prevent them from unionizing, which is nuts. Tech co…

I have had to put programming aside in 2025, probably for the rest of my life, so 2026 will be the year I reskill and reinvent myself. But most importantly, I want to finally becom…

Hey, where can I apply to a job like yours? I may not be smart enough, but I may be. And I am very interested in formal verification.

SAMS does do that. Read my article carefully; it also requires modification and distribution rights for users. See principles 0 and 1.

The title of the blog post downplays the absolute masterclass that this post is. It should be called "A Tale of Four Fuzzers: Best Practices for Advanced Fuzzing." And if you don't…

https://gavinhoward.com/2023/12/is-source-available-really-t...

I hope that FOSS work is never a burden, but that's too idealistic. For some, FOSS work is a burden on them and their loved ones. To those for whom it is, please don't feel obligat…

One of the few times I've read a paper before it was posted. I like this paper. While it's not anything groundbreaking or sensational, it did help me with the design of something I…

> It has been mentioned that it’s possible that the default for debug builds is that every single function is compiled as an async function. I.e. there is canonically only one func…

From my experience, the calling convention was, in 0.9.x, just an implementation detail, until it wasn't. I think I may still reserve judgment for when async is fully implemented. …

As the author of a semi-famous post about how Zig has function colors [1], I decided to read up on this. I see that blocking I/O is an option: > The most basic implementation of `I…

This looks excellent. I will probably implement this model for my own language.