Moonbit developers are lying to you

2025-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

The Moonbit team recently published a blog post claiming their language runs "30% faster than Rust" for FFT workloads. This is a lie by omission. They benchmarked against a deliberately crippled Rust implementation that no competent programmer would write.

The Moonbit FFT benchmark used a crippled Rust baseline and used to claim their language was faster than Rust.</li>
My corrected Rust implementation is 3.2–3.4× faster than Moonbit on the same benchmark.</li>
In 5 minutes of prompting GPT-5, I produced a Rust version already 2.33× faster than Moonbit.</li>
Zero PRs merged or replied to by the team at time of writing. There are PRs fixing the Rust benchmark older than their tweet announcing Moonbit was faster than Rust</a>.</li>
Moonbit devs are programming language developers that have marketed their language aggressively on the basis of performance for awhile now, they know better than this.</li>
Moonbit should retract or clearly amend their blog post with corrected Rust baseline results. Including the qualification that their benchmark is a naive Cooley-Tukey FFT benchmark and nothing else.</li> </ul>

Two memory issues from the last two weeks

2024-12-10T00:00:00+00:00

Okay maybe they don't qualify as actual memory bugs, but they were annoying and had memory as a common theme. One of them by itself doesn't merit a blog post so I bundled them together.

Rebuilding Rust (Leptos) apps quickly

2024-12-01T00:00:00+00:00

I'm working on a side project that is written in Rust on the backend and the frontend. The frontend component is in Leptos. Our app is about 20kLOC in total, so it takes a little time.

The cost of hosting is too damn high

2024-11-28T00:00:00+00:00

I recently migrated a side project from DigitalOcean to some dedicated servers. I thought that I would offer some context and examples for why.

Routines in caring for children

2024-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

I have 4 children aged 4, 3, almost 2, and 19 weeks. Parents are increasingly isolated from each other socially so it's harder to compare tactics and strategies for caregiving. I want to share a run-down of how my wife and I care for our children and what has seemed to work and what has not.

Obtaining happiness by using Diesel Async in anger

2024-09-02T00:00:00+00:00

I've been getting some questions from people about how to use Diesel and particularly diesel-async</code> for interacting with SQL databases in Rust. I thought I'd write up a quick post with some patterns and examples.
The example project on GitHub for this post is located at: https://github.com/bitemyapp/better-living-through-petroleum/tree/blog/diesel-async-in-anger</a>
The blog/diesel-async-in-anger</code> Git tag is so you can see the version of the code that I'm using for this post.
Notes on Luca Palmieri's Zero to Production in Rust 2022-06-25T00:00:00+00:00 I bought Luca Palmieri's book on the recommendation of a colleague and wanted to share my own thoughts on it as a production Rust user. I offer my thoughts as I go through the book linearly. I intentionally don't go out of my way to contextualize my commentary as this is not intended to be a substitute for Luca's excellent book. Also, it saves me time writing this blog post. Why I converted 2021-05-14T00:00:00+00:00 I was received into the Catholic Church on the Easter Vigil of 2019. Why I use and prefer GitLab CI 2019-10-10T00:00:00+00:00 In the past, I talked about how to make your CI builds faster using Drone CI</a>. I don't use DroneCI any more and haven't for a couple years now so I wanted to talk about what I use now. Abusing instance local functional dependencies for nicer number literals 2019-06-24T00:00:00+00:00 I demonstrated how to make kilobyte/megabyte constants in Haskell</a> and a Lobsters user asked how it worked. This is a bloggification of my reply to them explaining the trick. Wrapping up Haskell Book 2018-10-03T00:00:00+00:00 I'd like to summarize some of the background to Haskell Programming from First Principles'</a> development and finalization. How I stream myself coding 2018-03-14T00:00:00+00:00 Alright so I've been uploading streamed videos of myself working on programming projects for awhile now</a>. I occasionally get asked about my setup for this, so I thought I would explain the tools I use. This might be particularly valuable as I am primarily a Linux user where some of the kit for this can be kinda rough. Further, I am very picky about my tools and ergonomics so I didn't really want to make any sacrifices there in order to stream. How I make stew 2017-10-29T00:00:00+00:00 I think the first thing my mother taught me to cook was Kraft Mac-n-Cheese at age 9. Fortunately, I've been able to move past that since then. My repertoire is a bit limited but I like to think that by zeroing in on specific kinds of meals, I'm able to make them go a bit farther. A friend of mine asked how I do crockpot recipes and after stewing on it for awhile I thought I would write a post explaining my thought process. Comparing Persistent with Ecto and ActiveRecord 2017-10-06T00:00:00+00:00 Rejected title: You're not special I saw this article comparing Ecto and ActiveRecord: https://www.dailydrip.com/blog/ecto-vs-activerecord.html</a> I thought I would track alongside that post and show what the equivalent code looks like if you're using the Persistent</a> Haskell library. Alternatives to Typed Holes for talking to your compiler 2017-09-23T00:00:00+00:00 Rejected title: Type Praxis I frequently see people recommend that others use typed holes. I think people are more apt to recommend typed holes than the alternatives because it's a bespoke feature intended to enable discovering the type of a sub-expression more easily. Which is fair enough, except it doesn't really have a good use-case! I will demonstrate in this post why. What a Haskell Study Group is Not 2017-05-03T00:00:00+00:00 This article is by Steven Syrek</a>. I'm reposting it here because I endorse what he's saying. I believe Steven brings a valuable perspective on the haskell book</a>, reading groups, and education in general. Steven posted this article on his Medium</a>. He has also written some extended notes on pedagogy tied to this post here</a>. A review of Learn Python the Hard Way, 3rd ed 2017-03-25T00:00:00+00:00 As a break from usual, I thought I would review Zed Shaw's Learn Python the Hard Way. I've had several beginners to programming ask me what they should use to learn and Shaw's book frequently comes up. I've looked over his materials before when they were a free website but I wanted to see what the current published version was like. The Hashrocket websocket shootout in Haskell 2016-09-03T00:00:00+00:00 I recently PR'd</a> a Haskell entry to Hashrocket's websocket shootout</a>. Haskell seemed to do a lot better than C++, Rust, Golang, Elixir, Erlang, NodeJS, Ruby MRI, and JRuby.</strike> Although the Haskell version has been since fixed, so I can no longer run the benchmark reliably on my machine, so any final results will have to come from Hashrocket running the unagi-chan variant. 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I walk through some examples for how to do so with increasing sophistication building up to some simple uses of lens</code> and lens-aeson</code>. Either and (,) in Haskell are not arbitrary 2015-10-19T00:00:00+00:00 Programmers don't understand that it doesn't matter what the default target is for a type like Either</code> as long as there is one and it never changes. I go into some detail and justification of a programming language design that makes decisions like this inherent to the structure of the type rather than author's (arbitrary and harmful) preference. The Left</code> and Right</code> of Either</code> do not mean anything in and of themselves. Why we don't chuck our readers into web apps 2015-08-23T00:00:00+00:00 Haskell programmers that often forget how hard it was to learn and use Haskell. They also forget that without the benefit of a code example that does precisely what one wants, it can be nearly impossible for someone to make forward progress unless they have a solid foundation in the language itself. We justify how this reality influences the way we write the Haskell Programming from first principles</a> book. Building a Haskell game 2015-04-26T00:00:00+00:00 Sometimes building a package with dependencies on OpenGL can be a little confusing for people new to Haskell. I will use a simple game on Hackage as an exercise for demonstrating how you might do this on Ubuntu. Note: this was written before Stack</a> was a thing. Functional Education 2014-12-31T00:00:00+00:00 I often get asked why I do or do not recommend a particular resource for learning Haskell. To save some time and to record more detail than I'll remember off the top of my head, I've written a round-up of the issues with various resources and books people use to learn Haskell. 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Strong types and testing - in Haskell 2014-11-18T00:00:00+00:00 I respin an article originally written in Scala into Haskell, then veer off into the stratosphere. Parsing and rendering templates in Clojure & Haskell 2014-10-02T00:00:00+00:00 I rewrote somewhat difficult to understand templating code that was originally in Clojure into much simpler Haskell and yielded a large performance benefit for my trouble. URL Shortener in 43 lines of Haskell 2014-08-22T00:00:00+00:00 Written in Scotty. The code is not great. Aeson with types that have lots of 'maybes', v2 2014-07-31T00:00:00+00:00 The previous edition of this post was cleaned up by a suggestion from another Haskeller. I share it with you here. Aeson with types that have lots of 'maybes' 2014-07-30T00:00:00+00:00 Aeson is a real joy to use once you get into the swing of things, but there are some patterns out there that end-users are left to discover for themselves. One of those is how to deal with data that has a lot of instances of the Maybe</code> type. Meditations on learning Haskell 2014-04-29T00:00:00+00:00 This is an extraction of a conversation between multiple Haskellers in an IRC channel. I'm not identifying who said what and the ordering will be more topical than temporal. I'll add annotations for context as appropriate. I edited liberally. Parsing data of varying structure in Haskell with Aeson 2014-04-17T00:00:00+00:00 Need to parse data with varying structure? Once again we resort to our old friend for handling exclusive possibilities, the sum type. Nested user-defined types with Aeson 2014-04-11T00:00:00+00:00 Sometimes one knows only part of the structure to be parsed out of JSON ahead of time, with some of that structure being defined by a user or consumer of the API. The solution to this in general and when using Aeson to make the wrapper type parametric. Refactoring boilerplate from sum types 2014-04-11T00:00:00+00:00 A simple demonstration of extracting boilerplate from Aeson code handling a Just</code> and a Nothing</code> case of a Maybe</code> value. Grokking sum types, value constructors, and type constructors 2014-04-05T00:00:00+00:00 Recently I had an experience where in the course of helping somebody with a problem, I developed an example that I thought would help people understand sum types, value constructors, and type constructors better. Mutable closures in Haskell and nested IO 2014-03-25T00:00:00+00:00 In my last post</a>, I described IO (IO ()) as being a sign you might've made a mistake unless you knew it was what you wanted. There are patterns which involve using a closed-over mutable reference for things like counters. This naturally leads to nested IO actions. Monads, lifting, join, and side-effecting actions. 2014-03-24T00:00:00+00:00 While playing around with querying ElasticSearch</a> I bumped into something that I hadn't really understood explicitly before about monads, nesting, and IO. Rather than blather on, I'm going to share a "literate" ghci session that demonstrates the point. Main editing change I made was to remove duplication in the output from querying the type :t</code> in ghci. Using shebang and lein-exec to write Clojure scripts that can use dependencies 2013-02-18T00:00:00+00:00 A brief demonstration of how to run Clojure programs like scripts with leiningen</code>. Using drip for Clojure scripts (non-Leiningen) 2013-02-17T00:00:00+00:00 Using drip to run Clojure code like a script. February Book Log 2013-02-14T00:00:00+00:00 It's Valentine's Day 2013 and since January 2013 I've read the following books. OS X fsevent fatal error 'stdio.h' file not found 2012-07-01T00:00:00+00:00 Getting the following error on Mac OS X? Read on. Fixing arrow keys in iTerm and Terminal.app for Mac OS X 2012-06-01T00:00:00+00:00 I am a user of irssi over GNU Screen + ssh as well as locally, and I tend to use Emacs style text movements in bash, so need my ctrl and alt/option keys to work more or less as they do in Linux. Node.js, Requests, Connections, ending, and closing 2012-05-01T00:00:00+00:00 You close connections, you end requests. Fixing syntax highlighting in Jekyll 2012-04-02T00:00:00+00:00 When I was getting the Jekyll version of my site rolling, I ran into some problems with how RedCloth, liquid, and pygments were interacting. What follows is the error that was caused. How to resolve 'Could not find module XMonad.Actions.Volume' 2012-03-01T00:00:00+00:00 You need to install xmonad-extras</code> from Hackage as the volume control functions are not included by default in any standard XMonad install. Below is the script for getting it installed. Getting w3m to work with Emacs 23 in Ubuntu 11.10 2012-02-01T00:00:00+00:00 I encountered some issues getting Emacs 23 working on Ubuntu 11.10 and I wanted to chronicle my travails in case someone else bumped into this. I tripped into this error after installing w3m-el-snapshot</code>. Why the poor are poor 2012-01-01T00:00:00+00:00 Analysts and economists like to fixate on two metrics for personal finance, income and net worth. They are in some sense a measurement of slope, and of the volume under the curve minus spending and debt. I don't think either are a meaningful gauge for really understanding why the poor are frequently stuck being poor.