Something fascinating here: this is a codebase in C. It's not doing anything crazy by the rules of C. C is my preferred language, the one I'm best at. I understand every single line of code, on its own.
But a lot of the high level logic feels weirdly foreign, moreso than typical Go code even.
I can read the code and go "oh that's a hash table" pretty easily, and i get using a hash table to quickly identify cached blocks
But the table is, implicit? Sorta?
The heads of each "bucket" are stored in the cache, but there's no real bucket. Each block just has a doubly linked list to follow prev/next pointers which, sure, but then it also multiple other unrelated lists.
Okay, not too crazy.
But they're sorted by a fake ticker clock, except not entirely, only sorta quadratically? Which seems to just be a way to maintain a LRU in *yet another list* sorting the *exact same set* of *statically allocated blocks*.
And, i can untangle all of this. It requires pen and paper ( or a .tex file), but it's a fascinating experience reading something, understanding what it means, but having no clue what it's doing
pixx
npub15c…k3agq
2026-03-23 17:21:07 UTC
in reply to nevent1q…24ph
Author Public Key
npub15cwtx74f44j6snvq7yw74ncttpkzueufm47xd3e5nmtxd5hwazdqck3agqSeen on
wss://relay.momostr.pinkPublished at
2026-03-23 17:21:07 UTCEvent JSON
{
"id": "0e1f6746268b0e12b89061ab5f5cdab747161ec2ce6595e3b6f460db7126bb13",
"pubkey": "a61cb37aa9ad65a84d80f11deacf0b586c2e6789dd7c66c7349ed666d2eee89a",
"created_at": 1774286467,
"kind": 1,
"tags": [
[
"proxy",
"https://merveilles.town/@pixx/116279637903860523",
"web"
],
[
"p",
"a61cb37aa9ad65a84d80f11deacf0b586c2e6789dd7c66c7349ed666d2eee89a"
],
[
"e",
"1970cf961274148729a64654f05e1d3307236d413f55bf983cbaeb2bb2c33bd5",
"",
"root",
"a61cb37aa9ad65a84d80f11deacf0b586c2e6789dd7c66c7349ed666d2eee89a"
],
[
"proxy",
"https://merveilles.town/users/pixx/statuses/116279637903860523",
"activitypub"
],
[
"L",
"pink.momostr"
],
[
"l",
"pink.momostr.activitypub:https://merveilles.town/users/pixx/statuses/116279637903860523",
"pink.momostr"
],
[
"-"
]
],
"content": "Something fascinating here: this is a codebase in C. It's not doing anything crazy by the rules of C. C is my preferred language, the one I'm best at. I understand every single line of code, on its own.\n\nBut a lot of the high level logic feels weirdly foreign, moreso than typical Go code even.\n\nI can read the code and go \"oh that's a hash table\" pretty easily, and i get using a hash table to quickly identify cached blocks\n\nBut the table is, implicit? Sorta?\n\nThe heads of each \"bucket\" are stored in the cache, but there's no real bucket. Each block just has a doubly linked list to follow prev/next pointers which, sure, but then it also multiple other unrelated lists.\n\nOkay, not too crazy.\n\nBut they're sorted by a fake ticker clock, except not entirely, only sorta quadratically? Which seems to just be a way to maintain a LRU in *yet another list* sorting the *exact same set* of *statically allocated blocks*.\n\nAnd, i can untangle all of this. It requires pen and paper ( or a .tex file), but it's a fascinating experience reading something, understanding what it means, but having no clue what it's doing",
"sig": "0d938ffe7f3fc734cc937911e34125daa16a5b2fac21a8ac64c6dbdb5cd9e04c127537f167f7ab49960ee8a4263a115e8917a76e4d808c8a786f52384995ddab"
}