To make our library for efficient pangenomics more palatable, I made a little Unix shell. It “cheats” when it sees commands that invoke other pangenomic CLI tools and runs built-in functionality instead. The shell is built around an instruction-based IR that can fluidly intermix shell-like I/O (files and pipes) with efficient in-memory data structures. In a debatably fair comparison, the fake shell runs one shell script 48× faster than running it with sh.

A better reading experience for your Xteink. EPUB support, WiFi uploads, KOReader sync, and more. Flash from your browser.

Look who’s back! Carly Rae Jepsen, queen of critically acclaimed cult-favorite pop stars, has recently been teasing a return, and it’s about time. Jepsen never stops touring, but she hasn’t dropped a new album since 2022’s The Loneliest Time and its 2023 companion piece The Loveliest Time. She’s back in a few months with a…

A persistent vector.

Verilog is the foundation of all hardware design, and it is fatally flawed. We should all be worried about a glut of hardware bugs caused by Verilog’s unpredictable semantics and simplistic type system.

It is difficult to achieve elegance, efficiency, and parallelism simultaneously in functional programs that manipulate large data structures. We demonstrate this through careful analysis of program examples using three common functional data-structuring approaches-lists using Cons, arrays using Update (both fine-grained operators), and arrays using make-array (a “bulk” operator). We then present I-structure as an alternative and show elegant, efficient, and parallel solutions for the program examples in Id, a language with I-structures. The parallelism in Id is made precise by means of an operational semantics for Id as a parallel reduction system. I-structures make the language nonfunctional, but do not lose determinacy. Finally, we show that even in the context of purely functional languages, I-structures are invaluable for implementing functional data abstractions.