A Byte of Coding Issue 368

Hey-yo,

Sorry for the delay today, was traveling. “Why not just make the issue the day before?” you ask. Well, by the time I was done with urgent work it was late and I wanted to sleep. Plus this way you get the piping hot, brand new content. Anyway, here’s the issue.

Using @_silgen_name to call private Swift code and improve build times

Published: 14 March 2024

Tags: swift

Bruno Rocha explains what @_silgen_name is, how it works, and why you’d use it.

Some highlights:

• “like every other underscored attribute in Swift, this is something you should avoid messing with unless you know exactly what you're doing”

• “akin to the old-school forward declarations in Obj-C / C, allowing it to call functions that live deeper in the Swift Runtime even though it shouldn't be able to”

• “this is not an official feature of the language”

Postgres Performance Boost: HOT Updates and Fill Factor

Published: 13 March 2024

Tags: postgres, database, optimization

Elizabeth Christensen dives into HOT updates, which allow you to update tables with updating all of their indices.

Some highlights:

• “A HOT update occurs when a new version of a row can be stored on the same page as the original version, without the need to move the row to a new page”

• “By skipping the index update step, HOT updates reduce the amount of disk I/O and CPU processing required for an update operation, leading to better performance, especially for tables with large indexes or frequent updates”

• the system catalog can be queried to identify HOT updates

Differences Between ELF-32 and ELF-64

Published: 13 March 2024

Tags: elf, embed

Eric Johnson describes what ELF files are and compares the 32 and 64 bit versions.

Some highlights:

• “If you’re running a program on a UNIX-ish system, you’re probably using an ELF file”

• additional resources included on the ELF specification for further study

• the two formats are structurally similar, but differ in data representation and padding