Wingolog

Good evening, friends. Tonight I have a few loosely-knit stories.sootA couple years ago, my house was heated by a condensing gas boiler. It was awful from both an environmental and a geopolitical perspective: environmental, as I would emit somewhere aroun

Hear ye, hear ye: Wastrel and Hoot means REPL!Which is to say, Wastrel can now make native binaries out of WebAssembly files as produced by the Hoot Scheme toolchain, up to and including a full read-eval-print loop. Like the REPL on the Hoot web page, but

Over on his excellent blog, Matt Keeter posts some results from having ported a bytecode virtual machine to tail-calling style. He finds that his tail-calling interpreter written in Rust beats his switch-based interpreter, and even beats hand-coded assemb

Good evening. Tonight, we wrap up our series on free trade and the left. To recap where we were, I started by retelling the story that free trade improves overall productivity, but expressed reserves about the way in which it does so: plant closures and t

Before the managed data types extension to WebAssembly was incorporated in the standard, there was a huge debate about type equality. The end result is that if you have two types in a Wasm module that look the same, like this:(type $t (struct i32)) (type

Good evening. Let's talk about free trade!Last time, we discussed Marc-William Palen's Pax Economica, which looks at how the cause of free trade was taken up by a motley crew of anti-imperialists, internationalists, pacifists, marxists, and classical libe

A week ago we discussed free trade, and specifically took a look at the classical mechanism by which free trade is supposed to improve overall outcomes, as measured by GDP.As I described it, the value proposition of free trade is ambiguous at best: there

Today, a very quick note on dynamic instance type checks in virtual machines with single inheritance.The problem is that given an object o whose type is t, you want to check if o actually is of some more specific type u. To my knowledge, there are two sen