Tristan Isham

Hello, World!

Yesterday, I stumbled upon an article on Hacker News, Computer Scientists Invent an Efficient New Way to Count, by Quanta Magazine. The article details the discovery of a new algorithm called CVM for the distinct elements problem.

If you’re trying to develop software for people to use, it makes sense to target as many platforms as possible. When I started ZVM, that was one of the major reasons why I chose Go over Zig as its crafting language. That decision has paid off in droves. I have shipped a Windows, MacOS, Solaris, BSD, and Linux binary every release of ZVM, supporting x86, arm64 and more. However, this portability is a double edged sword. When you’re developing a cross-platform application, eventually you’ll run across an operating-system-dependent problem that can’t be abstracted away by the runtime. You’ll need to make syscalls, or change your I.O. operation paths. For me, that problem was symlinks on Windows.