Linkblog/2025/03/11

I made a game about learning to smile using your mouth and eyes.

It’s called Smile Like Zuck and it’s about making the same face as Mark Zuckerberg.

Another amazing internet thing from Nolen.

ええええっ！？

About a month ago, the CPython project merged a new implementation strategy for their bytecode interpreter. The initial headline results were very impressive, showing a 10-15% performance improvement on average across a wide range of benchmarks across a variety of platforms.

Unfortunately, as I will document in this post, these impressive performance gains turned out to be primarily due to inadvertently working around a regression in LLVM 19. When benchmarked against a better baseline (such GCC, clang-18, or LLVM 19 with certain tuning flags), the performance gain drops to 1-5% or so depending on the exact setup.

I hope to never reach the point in my software career where a regression in LLVM affects the performance characteristics of the software I’m working on…

From LWN.net.

This release fixes 75 bugs (addressing 162 👍), and adds +69 passing Node.js tests. It includes improvements to the frontend dev server, CSS modules support, a full rewrite of Node-API, faster Sign, Verify, Hash, Hmac from node:crypto, and bug fixes for node:net and Bun’s bundler.

The Bun team continues to put in the work for extreme Node compatibility.

New Davey Wreden game, with a soundtrack by C418!

This was an instant cop for me.

The TypeScript compiler is being ported to Go!

Dogfooding is obviously important, however I think this is a great choice.

[…], first all-new entry in eight years.

But… it’s exclusive to Apple Arcade.

Ahhhh! Why exclusive to a device I have no current intent in owning myself why!

Epic asset pack.