The fundamentals set you free.
Read. Understand. Master. Repeat.
Systems programming notes, benchmarked C tooling, and a desktop app that fingerprints your filesystem. By Younes Benmoussa.
Recent articles
- Introducing bit-crafts: a C11 monorepo for fast file inspection on Linux6 libraries, 3 tools, one C11 monorepo: bcduplicate finds duplicates at 758k files/s — 18× faster than rmlint on the same thread count.
- AI at work: what I built while everyone was debatingExperience report: six C libraries, three CLI tools, and a full intranet, built solo in four months for ~$1,000 of AI — what worked, what I won't delegate.
- parallel-walk-plus-process: the pattern behind bc-hash and bc-duplicateWhy find | xargs -P plateaus at scale, and how a strict barrier between parallel walk and parallel process cuts a recursive hash from 12s to 7s on 650k files.
- bc-duplicate: three passes to find duplicates without reading 99 % of the filesFind duplicates among a million files in 3.7 s: a size → fast-hash → full-hash pipeline with io_uring. Numbers, architecture, and why the hash choice matters.
- brk, sbrk, mmap: what malloc hidesmalloc calls brk for small allocations and mmap for large ones. What really happens under the hood, syscall by syscall.