Laurence Tratt
@ltratt.bsky.social
Shopify / Royal Academy of Engineering Research Chair in Language Engineering. https://tratt.net/laurie/
New post: "Async and finaliser deadlocks", based on an accidental poke from a recent episode of the excellent @oxide.computer podcast tratt.net/laurie/blog/...
November 12, 2025 at 11:28 AM
New post: "Async and finaliser deadlocks", based on an accidental poke from a recent episode of the excellent @oxide.computer podcast tratt.net/laurie/blog/...
New post: "What Context Can Bring to Terminal Mouse Clicks", explaining how one can click on filenames with line numbers in my terminal and have the "correct" editor instance jump to that file and line. A hack, or pragmatic use of existing tools? You decide! tratt.net/laurie/blog/...
October 29, 2025 at 2:06 PM
New post: "What Context Can Bring to Terminal Mouse Clicks", explaining how one can click on filenames with line numbers in my terminal and have the "correct" editor instance jump to that file and line. A hack, or pragmatic use of existing tools? You decide! tratt.net/laurie/blog/...
Although I'd prefer it if the trees stayed green all year around, if the leaves are going to fall, I'm rather happy that they do so in such a colourful way. It brings a new way of looking at old favourites.
October 19, 2025 at 7:51 AM
Although I'd prefer it if the trees stayed green all year around, if the leaves are going to fall, I'm rather happy that they do so in such a colourful way. It brings a new way of looking at old favourites.
Here's a visualisation of the evolution of our "Garbage Collection for Rust: The Finalizer Frontier" paper. The animation renders each git commit in the paper's history as a frame, with the time of the commit shown in the bottom right. The full hi-res version can be found at youtu.be/zC866HybCp8
October 15, 2025 at 1:28 PM
Here's a visualisation of the evolution of our "Garbage Collection for Rust: The Finalizer Frontier" paper. The animation renders each git commit in the paper's history as a frame, with the time of the commit shown in the bottom right. The full hi-res version can be found at youtu.be/zC866HybCp8
New paper with @jakehughes.uk : Garbage Collection for Rust: The Finalizer Frontier. There are lots of GCs for Rust: we tried pushing as far as we could in a new direction, particularly looking at what can be done about the headache that is finalizers.
October 15, 2025 at 12:02 PM
New paper with @jakehughes.uk : Garbage Collection for Rust: The Finalizer Frontier. There are lots of GCs for Rust: we tried pushing as far as we could in a new direction, particularly looking at what can be done about the headache that is finalizers.
Stourhead's Pantheon looked rather fine yesterday.
October 13, 2025 at 7:03 AM
Stourhead's Pantheon looked rather fine yesterday.
I sometimes wonder to myself: what do normal folk think when they see the result of a (classic) software bug like the below?
September 29, 2025 at 9:04 AM
I sometimes wonder to myself: what do normal folk think when they see the result of a (classic) software bug like the below?
Another person has left a negative review for our local graveyard.
September 25, 2025 at 7:56 AM
Another person has left a negative review for our local graveyard.
New post: Why Firsts Matter tratt.net/laurie/blog/...
September 16, 2025 at 10:03 AM
New post: Why Firsts Matter tratt.net/laurie/blog/...
When I upgraded my OpenSSH a couple of weeks back, I started getting some surprising (to me) warnings when using GitHub. I'm not sure I'd enjoy being the person who has to upgrade the fleet of servers that are now being fingered as culprits!
August 22, 2025 at 7:14 AM
When I upgraded my OpenSSH a couple of weeks back, I started getting some surprising (to me) warnings when using GitHub. I'm not sure I'd enjoy being the person who has to upgrade the fleet of servers that are now being fingered as culprits!
I have been a Unix user for a... long time... yet only today did I accidentally discover that `:` is a built-in shell no-opt.
August 12, 2025 at 1:44 PM
I have been a Unix user for a... long time... yet only today did I accidentally discover that `:` is a built-in shell no-opt.
New post: LLM Inflation tratt.net/laurie/blog/...
August 6, 2025 at 9:58 AM
New post: LLM Inflation tratt.net/laurie/blog/...
New post: Comparing the Glove80 and Maltron keyboards tratt.net/laurie/blog/...
July 22, 2025 at 10:13 AM
New post: Comparing the Glove80 and Maltron keyboards tratt.net/laurie/blog/...
The LLM-for-software Yo-yo tratt.net/laurie/blog/...
July 14, 2025 at 9:39 AM
The LLM-for-software Yo-yo tratt.net/laurie/blog/...
Hamming has a profound observation on this in You and Your Research
April 7, 2025 at 3:50 PM
Hamming has a profound observation on this in You and Your Research
New post: The Fifth Kind of Optimisation tratt.net/laurie/blog/...
April 2, 2025 at 10:25 AM
New post: The Fifth Kind of Optimisation tratt.net/laurie/blog/...
Will no-one think of the children?
March 31, 2025 at 4:01 PM
Will no-one think of the children?
New post: Better Shell History Search tratt.net/laurie/blog/...
March 25, 2025 at 11:59 AM
New post: Better Shell History Search tratt.net/laurie/blog/...
My best guess is that some programming will be highly automated and some won't. A lot depends on your definition of "programming" and "programmer", something I failed to appreciate for a long time. I still stand behind two posts of mine starting (non-chronologically!) with tratt.net/laurie/blog/...
March 12, 2025 at 8:59 AM
My best guess is that some programming will be highly automated and some won't. A lot depends on your definition of "programming" and "programmer", something I failed to appreciate for a long time. I still stand behind two posts of mine starting (non-chronologically!) with tratt.net/laurie/blog/...
This new paper by Poirier et al. is an interesting example of how baffling CPU performance is to compiler authors. Sometimes I make a big change, and performance doesn't budge, while in other cases trivial changes have big effects. Across CPUs the effects can vary wildly.
March 3, 2025 at 11:34 AM
This new paper by Poirier et al. is an interesting example of how baffling CPU performance is to compiler authors. Sometimes I make a big change, and performance doesn't budge, while in other cases trivial changes have big effects. Across CPUs the effects can vary wildly.
I've been a long-term user of fzf: its Ctrl-R feature for searching shell history is an astonishing productivity gain. Recently I tried skim, a similar tool, and realised that I could present my history nicely: with times/dates, and without row indices.
February 20, 2025 at 6:00 PM
I've been a long-term user of fzf: its Ctrl-R feature for searching shell history is an astonishing productivity gain. Recently I tried skim, a similar tool, and realised that I could present my history nicely: with times/dates, and without row indices.
New post: "Can We Retain the Benefits of Transitive Dependencies Without Undermining Security?" tratt.net/laurie/blog/...
January 28, 2025 at 11:34 AM
New post: "Can We Retain the Benefits of Transitive Dependencies Without Undermining Security?" tratt.net/laurie/blog/...
Today I had to set up SSL certificates for something. I baffled myself, as per normal, just as I wrote in this post a couple of weeks ago tratt.net/laurie/blog/...
November 30, 2024 at 11:01 PM
Today I had to set up SSL certificates for something. I baffled myself, as per normal, just as I wrote in this post a couple of weeks ago tratt.net/laurie/blog/...
New blog post: Structured Editing and Incremental Parsing tratt.net/laurie/blog/...
November 27, 2024 at 12:30 PM
New blog post: Structured Editing and Incremental Parsing tratt.net/laurie/blog/...
No wonder Somerset don't play cricket here any more: they use flying balls! How is anyone supposed to play with such things?
October 17, 2024 at 5:33 PM
No wonder Somerset don't play cricket here any more: they use flying balls! How is anyone supposed to play with such things?