Four short links: 17 July 2020
Computation, Web Assembly, Indexing on Spark, and Web UI
- Matters Computational: Ideas, Algorithms, Source Code — Interesting book about how to do things at the low level. This is a book for the computationalist, whether a working programmer or anyone interested in methods of computation. The focus is on material that does not usually appear in textbooks on algorithms. It’s the kind of book where “word” means a series of bits not a series of characters.
- Hijacking Control Flow in Web Assembly — The more that WASM takes off, the more that programmers will need to know these kinds of weaknesses. For more on WASM security, see this IEEE Spectrum article.
- Microsoft Open-Sources Haystack — At a high-level, Hyperspace offers users the ability to: (1) Build indexes on your data (e.g., CSV, JSON, Parquet). (2) Maintain the indexes through a multi-user concurrency model.(3) Leverage these indexes automatically, within your Spark workloads, without any changes to your application code for query/workload acceleration.
When running test queries derived from industry-standard TPC benchmarks (Test-H and Test-DS) over 1 TB of Parquet data, we have seen Hyperspace deliver up to 11x acceleration in query performance for individual queries. Code on Github. - Shoelace — A forward-thinking library of web components. Works with all frameworks; Works with CDNs; Fully customizable with CSS; Open source. Clever approach: only contains components that work on all browsers, so if you colour within these lines then your creation will work on all browsers.
