small string optimization

Ruby developer Avdi Grimm gives a seven-minute tour of Pharo Smalltalk's development environment, focusing on tools like search-by-example and the integrated, live coding experience.

Aditya Siram argues that functional programming has much to learn from Smalltalk's interactivity, using Pharo and Squeak to show live, visual, explorable programming environments.

Noel Rappin's MountainWest RubyConf talk introduces Smalltalk to Ruby programmers. He compares the two languages' object models, blocks, 1-based arrays, simple syntax and live programming environment, and walks through sample code.

A Computer History Museum demonstration with Dan Ingalls of Smalltalk-76 running on a Xerox Alto, recorded in 2017. He shows the live environment and discusses the system.

A brief demo of the Smalltalk debugger, including defining a method that doesn't exist yet while the program is stopped mid-crash.

A roughly two-hour demonstration by Dan Ingalls of Smalltalk running on the Computer History Museum's restored Xerox Alto. It shows the integrated environment and language designed at Xerox PARC as personal dynamic media.

Stephen Kell's Strange Loop talk argues that C and Unix already contain Smalltalk-like dynamism and introspection that can be exposed. He presents his liballocs research on bridging dynamic and compiled languages.

Casey Muratori's first refterm lecture lays out philosophies of optimization, distinguishing optimization from non-pessimization, which means avoiding needless work. It uses his fast terminal renderer project to show how fast computers really are.

Robert Martin's RailsConf 2009 talk looks at why Smalltalk lost out despite its technical strengths. He draws lessons about language communities and arrogance that he argues could hurt Ruby too.

Matt Godbolt, creator of Compiler Explorer, tours surprising optimizations modern compilers perform, such as turning loops into closed-form sums and using popcount instructions. He explores what the compiler does behind the scenes.

Andrei Alexandrescu's ACCU 2016 talk previews material from his book on writing fast code, with a focus on optimization techniques such as sentinels and faster search.

Alan Kay's tribute to Ted Nelson at the Intertwingled festival, presented using a revived Smalltalk-78 system running on emulated 1970s Xerox PARC hardware. It shows live, user-programmable software from that era.

Netflix engineer Drew Gallatin's EuroBSDcon 2022 talk quantifies the older FreeBSD optimizations that let Netflix serve web traffic at 800Gb/s, including TSO, LRO, VM page cache zones, asynchronous sendfile and unmapped mbufs.

Chandler Carruth's CppNow 2013 keynote on how C++ builds complex software from simple emergent structures, and how compilers optimize them through inlining and value semantics.

Smalltalk pioneer Dan Ingalls presents the Lively Kernel at JSConf US 2012, a live, direct-manipulation programming environment running in the browser. He shows drag-and-drop building of live objects on the web.

A Foresight Institute workshop video with two talks: Shawn Douglas on nanoscale instruments for visualizing small proteins, and Bret Victor on Dynamicland. Victor's part shows biomolecular design built in his Realtalk system with physical objects.

A short product demo of Dabble DB, a web tool for importing, entering and manipulating structured data with little effort. It was built in Smalltalk and later acquired by Twitter.

A full upload of Alan Kay's 1987 talk, with demos of several Smalltalk-era software systems and ideas about visual, kinesthetic and symbolic reasoning. It includes a Smalltalk program written by a 12-year-old and footage of the Rand tablet.

Khalil Estell's CppCon 2024 talk argues C++ exceptions can reduce binary size in firmware. He digs into how exceptions work and how to shrink their code footprint on embedded platforms.

Chandler Carruth's CppCon 2016 talk tries to defuse the heated debate over undefined behavior in C and C++. He explains from the compiler writer's perspective why UB exists and how it enables optimization.

Stephan T. Lavavej's CppCon 2019 talk on implementing floating-point to_chars and from_chars in Microsoft's C++ STL. It covers the history of float-string conversion and the algorithms that make it much faster.

Maciej Ceglowski's talk at Web Directions argues that small teams and lone programmers can build sustainable businesses without chasing Silicon Valley's grow-or-die model. He offers alternative, more achievable definitions of success.

Scott Wlaschin's NDC Oslo talk on four 1970s languages, SQL, Prolog, ML and Smalltalk. It explains their philosophies and what practical principles they still offer modern developers.

A 1995 Sun Microsystems film about the Self programming language, a prototype-based Smalltalk relative, showing its live, graphical programming environment.

A 12-minute demo of the Alternate Reality Kit, built by Randall Smith at Xerox PARC in 1986. It is a simulated physical world in which users manipulate objects and program by direct interaction.

Christian Schafmeister presents CANDO at the 2016 European Lisp Symposium. It is a compiled Lisp-based language for designing macromolecules and nanoscale materials, built on the Clasp implementation of Common Lisp.

Tudor Girba's Curry On! 2019 talk on moldable development, the idea that developers should build custom tools and views for each software system they work on. It draws on the Pharo and Glamorous Toolkit environments.

A three-minute clip from The Wire season 3 in which Stringer Bell chairs a drug-crew business meeting using Robert's Rules of Order. The scene plays the formal procedure against the criminal setting.

A short animated simulation comparing how Multics and Unix were developed, showing why Unix's small composable programs and pipes gave it a efficiency advantage. It frames Unix as a moonshot achievable by a small team.

Joe Armstrong, creator of Erlang, interviews Alan Kay at Code Mesh. They discuss the meaning of object orientation, message passing, the META II paper, and the state of computer science.

An Alan Kay talk on programming and scaling, covering theoretical limits of code size, engineering versus tinkering, and biological cells as inspiration for object-oriented design.

Andrew Adams, a Halide developer, presents the Halide language for image processing and tensor computation. The talk explains the separation of algorithm from schedule with illustrated examples of parallelism, locality and redundancy tradeoffs.

Jan Vitek of Northeastern University gives a meetup talk on the challenges of making the R language run fast. He explains what in R's semantics makes it hard to optimize and to build a JIT compiler for.

Avi Bryant demos Dabble DB, a web-based spreadsheet-like database for building apps without code. It shows how users can model and relate data through a smooth interface.

Lukas Eder's Devoxx talk on how modern cost-based SQL optimizers rewrite and plan queries in ways developers would not expect. It argues that declarative SQL, used well, can run complex queries very fast.

A long recorded seminar in which Alan Kay discusses object-oriented programming, probably from the mid-1980s. He covers the original idea of objects, messaging and the work done at Xerox.

The winning demo from Revision 2015's oldskool competition, running on a real 1981 IBM PC with CGA at 4.77MHz. It uses extreme tricks to produce effects, graphics and sound far beyond what the hardware was thought capable of.

Marshall Kirk McKusick gives a talk at EuroBSDCon tracing filesystem and storage development from 1979 to today, using the BSD Fast Filesystem as the focus. It covers early disk-geometry optimization through later contiguous layout and small-file performance work.

Paul Biggar's Google Tech Talk on compiling and optimizing scripting languages, drawn from his work on the phc ahead-of-time PHP compiler. He covers runtime typing, aliasing and code generation challenges, and argues AOT can compete with JIT.

A short live demo of Dental Wings' Virtuo Vivo intraoral scanner at IDS 2019. It shows a fast color scan with a small, lightweight handpiece.