Systems Programming

In 1984, researchers at the University of Illinois published a paper that would quietly shape every multicore processor built since. Mark Papamarcos and Janak Patel proposed a solution to a problem that didn’t seem urgent at the time—how to keep data consistent when multiple processors each have their own cache. Today, with CPUs packing dozens of cores, their invention runs on billions of devices, silently orchestrating a dance of state transitions every time one core writes to memory and another needs to read it. ...

In April 2015, Luke Wagner made the first commits to a new repository called WebAssembly/design, adding a high-level design document for what would become the fourth language of the web. The project emerged from a convergence of efforts: Mozilla’s asm.js experiment had demonstrated that a strictly-typed subset of JavaScript could approach native speeds, while Google’s PNaCl and Microsoft’s efforts in this space had explored similar territory. What none of these projects achieved was cross-browser consensus. WebAssembly was designed from the start as a collaborative effort, with formal semantics written in parallel with its specification. ...