Hello, and welcome to a new issue of Links list! Lots of articles this time; hopefully some will be interesting to you!
Usage of Rust in Android
Two related articles: the first, from Google's Security Blog, is a bit more high-level. The second is a paper, and thus more in-depth, with concrete suggestions on "how to adopt Rust in your codebase". The benefits that the Android team saw are fantastic and don't really need much commentary:
We adopted Rust for its security and are seeing a 1000x reduction in memory safety vulnerability density compared to Android's C and C++ code
With Rust changes having a 4x lower rollback rate and spending 25% less time in code review, the safer path is now also the faster one.
eBPF to monitor billions of kernel events per minute
The fantastic technical blog of Datadog has a new, very interesting article, which goes into details on how they implemented a file integrity monitoring tool, using eBPF for performance. eBPF really has become the tool of choice for so many observability and security tools - it is a really interesting technology.
You should write an agent
A couple of really nice tutorials on what really is involved in building an agent. Building one is actually really simple; I've built a couple of toys, and it really is impressive how effective a modern (!) model can be with some basic tools. But the devil is in the detail; for example, for me, using Claude Code or OpenAI's Codex is so much nicer than alternatives like Cursor or Windsurf, even if the underlying models are the same.
Microwaves are the future!
If you're exhausted by all the AI news, here's a fun read to remind you that it's worth taking what AI-selling executives say with at least a couple of pinches of salt.
Porting Doom to Atari
A really fun adventure in porting Doom to a very old platform like the Atari ST (a 1985 computer), in assembly.
Go's new garbage collector
A really interesting approach from Go's newest garbage collector. Given how impactful having a cache vs a main memory access is with a modern CPU, the idea of Green Tea is just to work per-page, rather than per-object. This is a lot more cache-friendly, and the team also implemented parts of the algorithm with AVX-512 for performance, resulting in a 10% to 40% reduction in GC costs. It's a very interesting blog, full of details but very clear to read. Highly recommended!
The <output> tag
I didn't know about this one, but I can see it being useful for accessibility purposes. And, it makes your intent clearer, which is always a good thing. Finally, imagine having an <output> tag and an .output CSS selector, compared to stuff like <div class="llm-chat-box-output-widget current"> (or, you know, any Tailwind class soup).
Typst
Typst is a modern reimagination of LaTeX. I've tried to use it recently for a couple documents and it's been a really good experience.
On the importance of being mildly annoyed
A really entertaining and smart piece about how most people are actually pretty mildly annoyed all the time, and why that is important:
When we say, "I love my job," we really mean, "My job pisses me off, but in an enchanting way."