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Chris Wellons
My name is Chris Wellons, though I sometimes use the handle skeeto. I am a professional software engineer with a passion for developing precise and efficient software. On this blog, ongoing since 2007, I explain topics that I’ve recently learned, share software development techniques I’ve discovered or even invented, showcase cool demos, and discuss my contributions to open source.
Latest Posts
Readers will be familiar with Mask-Step-Index (MSI) hash tables, a technique for building fast, open-addressed hash tables in a dozen lines of code. If multiple threads or processes access an MSI table with at least one still inserting...
This past Tuesday I typed C-x C-c in Emacs for the last time after 20 years of daily use. Though nearly half that time was gradually retiring it, switching to modal editing, then to Vim. Emacs is a platform, and I’d grown accustomed to...
The new w64devkit release two weeks ago is the first to be code-signed with my identity, verified by Microsoft’s certificate chain. Currently only the release packaging is signed — the self-extracting archive and its payload — but I will...
CMake has a --debugger mode since 3.27 (July 2023), allowing software to manipulate it interactively through the Debugger Adaptor Protocol (DAP), an HTTP-like protocol passing JSON messages. Debugger front-ends can start, stop, step,...
In February I left my employer after nearly two decades of service. In the moment I was optimistic, yet unsure I made the right choice. Dust settled, I’m now absolutely sure I chose correctly. I’m happier and better for it. There were...
I came across a recent article on making Linux system calls from a Wine process. Windows programs running under Wine are still normal Linux processes and may interact with the Linux kernel like any other process. None of this was...
Software above some complexity level tends to sport an extension language, becoming a kind of software platform itself. Lua fills this role well, and of course there’s JavaScript for web technologies. WebAssembly generalizes this, and...
Linked lists are a data structure basic building block, with especially flexible allocation behavior. They’re not just a useful starting point, but sometimes a sound foundation for future growth. I’m going to start with the beginner...
In preparation for a future project, I was thinking about at the unix find utility. It operates a file system hierarchies, with basic operations selected and filtered using a specialized expression language. Users compose operations...
Back in 2017 I wrote about a technique for creating closures in C using JIT-compiled wrapper. It’s neat, though rarely necessary in real programs, so I don’t think about it often. I applied it to qsort, which sadly accepts no context...
As I continue to reflect on arenas and lifetimes in C++, I realized that dealing with destructors is not so onerous. In fact, it does not even impact my established arena usage! That is, implicit RAII-style deallocation at scope...
Update October 2025: further enhancements. Patrice Roy’s new book, C++ Memory Management, has made me more conscious of object lifetimes. C++ is stricter than C about lifetimes, and common, textbook memory management that’s sound in C is...
In a recent, real world problem I needed to load a heterogeneous sequence of records from a buffer. Record layout is defined in a header before the sequence. Each field is numeric, with a unique name composed of non-empty alphanumeric...