Jakob Külzer

Welcome to my blog where I write about things that interest me, stuff that was hard to figure out, and sometimes just to show off. I hope you find something interesting.

Recent Blog Posts

Zig Fetch

17 Jul 2024 , tagged: zig

Zig’s package manager is still a bit rough. It only supports fetching tarballs, but many github projects don’t have them unless they have a release. There’s a trick to fetch any commit as a tarball though: https://api.github.com/repos/<repo-owner>/<repo>/tarball/<ref> zig fetch can than download the code: zig fetch --save https://api.github.com/repos/<repo-owner>/<repo>/tarball/<ref> Once the code is downloaded, it still has to be added to your exe or libray in build.zig: const exe = b.addExecutable(.{ .

One Billion Row Challenge in Zig

05 May 2024 , tagged: one billion row challenge, zig, SIMD, performance

I finally got around to looking into The One Billion Row Challenge. If you’re unfamiliar, it’s a challenge to how fast a program can read and process one billion rows. It’s fascinating because it’s all about raw performance including algorithms, CPU instructions, and profiling and benchmarking. All things I enjoy dabbling with. So one Saturday evening I started reading up on the challenge. The first thing that struck me was the top entries’ time: 1.

mkdocs

16 Feb 2024 , tagged: software, mkdocs, books

I recently realized the docker container for my toy project books has over 2k downloads so I finally decided to write some proper docs for it. There’s not much to document, but it deserves a nice webpage. Picked up mkdocs because I saw it used by some other projects and I’m positively surprised. You initialize a project and throw some markdown files at it. Then you run build and it gives you a nice webpage for your docs, nothing more, nothing less.

Zig - First Impressions

23 Oct 2023 , tagged: zig, First Impression

I’ve been following the zig language for a while ever since I saw Andrew Kelly’s talk on Corecursive. The way Andrew describes the design of zig was very engrossing and who doesn’t like a language build for speed. But I have struggled with picking it up; time is in short supply and so were docs for zig when I first looked at it. But that has changed; I finally found some motivation and ziglearn.