Data Daily
In-depth articles on technology shaping what comes next.
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Why jemalloc Matters: Memory Allocation at Scale
Every time your program calls malloc(), something has to decide which chunk of virtual memory to hand back. This decision — trivial for a small program —...
Sub-Millisecond VM Sandboxes via Copy-on-Write
Starting a Docker container takes about 500 milliseconds. A Firecracker microVM takes about 125 milliseconds. A V8 isolate takes about 5 milliseconds. But a...
VisiCalc and the Software That Made Hardware Worth Buying
Before VisiCalc, personal computers were toys for hobbyists. After VisiCalc, they were business tools. That's not an exaggeration — it's the documented sales...
FreeBSD: The Underappreciated Server OS
When Netflix serves you a movie, the video data is likely coming from a FreeBSD server. When you send a WhatsApp message, it's routed through infrastructure...
How JPEG Compression Actually Works
JPEG is the cockroach of file formats. It was standardized in 1992, predates the web browser, and has survived every attempt to replace it. WebP, AVIF, HEIC —...
Pyodide: Running Real Python in the Browser via WebAssembly
Python in the browser has been a dream since the early 2010s, and every attempt has had the same problem: Python is too deeply tied to CPython's C runtime to...
Why Great Software Takes Time and Can't Be Rushed
Flask took eight years to reach version 1.0. SQLite has been in active development since 2000 and still gets meaningful improvements. The Linux kernel is over...