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Operating systems and runtimes
package-distro
OS package management
Nix, apt
System
Techniques · 20
Primitives · 69
package-distro
CDN and edge
cloud · medium: CDNs cache content in hundreds of PoPs near users, cutting latency and egress bills; edge compute runs small code there. Bandwidth price spreads 10x between providers.
›
Dependency version resolution
compilers · medium: Pick package versions that satisfy semver constraints (PubGrub, SAT) with readable conflict errors
Binary delta diff
compression · medium: Bsdiff, VCDIFF and xdelta-style binary patches between file versions
Deterministic simulation testing
distributed · medium: Run the whole system in one thread under a seeded scheduler with simulated network, disk and clock, so every failure replays from its seed.
›
Primary-backup replication
distributed · medium: One node orders all writes and ships them to standbys; the acknowledgement rule (none, one, all) sets what a crash loses, and an external arbiter decides who takes over.
›
CDCL SAT solving
optimization · medium: Search for a satisfying assignment, learn a new constraint from every dead end, and jump back past irrelevant choices; handles industrial formulas with millions of clauses.
›
Coverage-guided fuzzing
security · medium: Mutate inputs, run an instrumented target, and keep any input that reaches a new code edge; feedback turns blind guessing into incremental search.
›
Topological sort
graphs · low: Order the vertices of a DAG so every edge points forward; the core of build systems, schedulers and dependency resolution, with cycle detection for free.
›
Content-addressed storage
storage · low: Store each blob under the hash of its bytes: immutable, deduplicated by construction, self-verifying on every read, and composable into Merkle trees.
›
Cryptographic hashes (SHA-2, BLAKE3)
security · low: Collision-resistant fingerprints of data; SHA-256 for interoperability, BLAKE3 for speed, HMAC/HKDF for keyed uses.
›
Digital signatures (Ed25519)
security · low: Small, fast, deterministic public-key signatures that prove who produced a message; the default for tokens, releases and protocols.
›
Mark-sweep garbage collection
compilers · low: Find everything reachable from the roots, free the rest in place; handles cycles, never moves objects, and is the base of most production collectors.
›
Zstandard (zstd)
compression · low: LZ77 plus Huffman and FSE entropy coding, with levels from LZ4-like speed to xz-like ratio, all decoding at about 1-2 GB/s.
›
Hdr histogram
data-structures · low: Log-linear bucketed histograms with bounded relative error for latency percentiles
Atomic file replacement
hardware-os · low: Write temp file, fsync, rename over target, fsync directory: crash-safe whole-file updates
Process supervision
hardware-os · low: A parent process starts services, reaps their exits and restarts them under a delay and burst-limit policy, then stops them with SIGTERM before SIGKILL.
›
Mutual TLS
security · low: TLS where the client also proves a certificate key, so every connection carries a verified, rotatable machine identity.
›
Graceful draining
systems · low: On a termination signal, stop taking new work, finish in-flight work until a deadline, tell clients to reconnect elsewhere, then exit; clients resume from a token.
›
HTTP caching semantics
networking · low: The rules (RFC 9111) that decide whether a stored response is still fresh, and how a cheap conditional request revalidates it when it is not.
›
Semver range matching
compilers · low: Semantic version parsing, ordering and range matching
Delta encoding
compression · low: Store differences between consecutive values instead of the values, turning sorted IDs, timestamps and counters into small numbers that pack into few bits.
›
LZ77
compression · low: Replace repeated byte strings with (distance, length) back-references into a sliding window; the parsing stage of gzip, LZ4, zstd, Brotli and xz.
›
Rolling hash
data-structures · low: Rabin-Karp polynomial rolling hashes and winnowing for substring fingerprints and document matching
+ 13 more techniques
+ 53 more primitives
System
Techniques · 20
Primitives · 69
package-distro
CDN and edge
cloud · medium: CDNs cache content in hundreds of PoPs near users, cutting latency and egress bills; edge compute runs small code there. Bandwidth price spreads 10x between providers.
›
Dependency version resolution
compilers · medium: Pick package versions that satisfy semver constraints (PubGrub, SAT) with readable conflict errors
Binary delta diff
compression · medium: Bsdiff, VCDIFF and xdelta-style binary patches between file versions
Deterministic simulation testing
distributed · medium: Run the whole system in one thread under a seeded scheduler with simulated network, disk and clock, so every failure replays from its seed.
›
Primary-backup replication
distributed · medium: One node orders all writes and ships them to standbys; the acknowledgement rule (none, one, all) sets what a crash loses, and an external arbiter decides who takes over.
›
CDCL SAT solving
optimization · medium: Search for a satisfying assignment, learn a new constraint from every dead end, and jump back past irrelevant choices; handles industrial formulas with millions of clauses.
›
Coverage-guided fuzzing
security · medium: Mutate inputs, run an instrumented target, and keep any input that reaches a new code edge; feedback turns blind guessing into incremental search.
›
Process sandboxing
security · medium: Run risky work in a separate, deliberately powerless process and let a small privileged broker do the few things it needs, over a narrow pipe.
›
Reproducible builds
security · medium: Bit-identical outputs: fixed timestamps, ordering, paths and toolchains
Signed update metadata (TUF)
security · medium: Separate signing roles with thresholds sign small metadata pinning file hashes, versions and expiry, so clients detect rollback, freeze and mix-and-match and recover by rotating the root.
›
Point-in-time recovery
storage · medium: Periodic base backups plus a continuously archived change log let you rebuild the state as of any instant, then branch from there.
›
Delta debugging
compilers · medium: Ddmin minimization of failing inputs or change sets
Fault injection
distributed · medium: Inject latency, errors, kills and partitions via proxies, netem or hooks
Key rotation
security · medium: Rotating keys without downtime: key ids, overlap windows, re-wrapping, JWKS publication, revocation
TLS 1.3
security · medium: The standard encrypted, authenticated transport; one round trip, only forward-secret AEAD suites, and little left to misconfigure.
›
ARIES recovery
storage · medium: Three-pass crash recovery (analysis, redo, undo) for steal/no-force buffer pools; repeats history, then rolls back losers with compensation log records.
›
Hermetic execution
systems · medium: Run actions with only declared inputs in a sandbox and fixed environment
Envelope encryption
security · medium: Encrypt each object with its own data key and wrap that key under a KMS-held key, so rotation re-wraps 60 bytes and deleting a key shreds data.
›
Syscall interception
security · medium: Intercept syscalls via ptrace, seccomp user notify or a user-space kernel
Buffer pool
storage · medium: The database's own page cache (frames, page table, pin counts, dirty bits, replacement) so it, not the OS, controls eviction, write order and I/O.
›
Topological sort
graphs · low: Order the vertices of a DAG so every edge points forward; the core of build systems, schedulers and dependency resolution, with cycle detection for free.
›
Content-addressed storage
storage · low: Store each blob under the hash of its bytes: immutable, deduplicated by construction, self-verifying on every read, and composable into Merkle trees.
›
Cryptographic hashes (SHA-2, BLAKE3)
security · low: Collision-resistant fingerprints of data; SHA-256 for interoperability, BLAKE3 for speed, HMAC/HKDF for keyed uses.
›
Digital signatures (Ed25519)
security · low: Small, fast, deterministic public-key signatures that prove who produced a message; the default for tokens, releases and protocols.
›
Mark-sweep garbage collection
compilers · low: Find everything reachable from the roots, free the rest in place; handles cycles, never moves objects, and is the base of most production collectors.
›
Zstandard (zstd)
compression · low: LZ77 plus Huffman and FSE entropy coding, with levels from LZ4-like speed to xz-like ratio, all decoding at about 1-2 GB/s.
›
Hdr histogram
data-structures · low: Log-linear bucketed histograms with bounded relative error for latency percentiles
Atomic file replacement
hardware-os · low: Write temp file, fsync, rename over target, fsync directory: crash-safe whole-file updates
Process supervision
hardware-os · low: A parent process starts services, reaps their exits and restarts them under a delay and burst-limit policy, then stops them with SIGTERM before SIGKILL.
›
Mutual TLS
security · low: TLS where the client also proves a certificate key, so every connection carries a verified, rotatable machine identity.
›
Graceful draining
systems · low: On a termination signal, stop taking new work, finish in-flight work until a deadline, tell clients to reconnect elsewhere, then exit; clients resume from a token.
›
HTTP caching semantics
networking · low: The rules (RFC 9111) that decide whether a stored response is still fresh, and how a cheap conditional request revalidates it when it is not.
›
Semver range matching
compilers · low: Semantic version parsing, ordering and range matching
Delta encoding
compression · low: Store differences between consecutive values instead of the values, turning sorted IDs, timestamps and counters into small numbers that pack into few bits.
›
LZ77
compression · low: Replace repeated byte strings with (distance, length) back-references into a sliding window; the parsing stage of gzip, LZ4, zstd, Brotli and xz.
›
Rolling hash
data-structures · low: Rabin-Karp polynomial rolling hashes and winnowing for substring fingerprints and document matching
Suffix array
search-sort · low: Sorted array of all suffix start positions of a text; finds every occurrence of any substring by binary search, at 4-5 bytes per text byte.
›
Cooperative scheduling
concurrency · low: Green threads/coroutines yielding at await points on a user-space scheduler
Record replay
distributed · low: Record every nondeterministic input (time, randomness, I/O, model and tool outputs, per-tick player input) and re-execute deterministically for debugging, replays and state rebuild
PRNGs (PCG, xoshiro)
numerics · low: Small, fast, statistically strong non-cryptographic generators: PCG32 and xoshiro256**, with seeding, parallel streams and unbiased ranges.
›
Leases
distributed · low: A lock that expires on its own: bounded-time ownership that survives crashes and partitions, given bounded clock drift and fencing tokens on writes.
›
Write-ahead log
storage · low: Append each change to a checksummed sequential log and fsync it before touching data pages; the basis of crash durability in nearly every database.
›
Health checking
systems · low: Decide per backend whether to route to it using probes and real-traffic errors, with consecutive-count hysteresis, capped ejection and a panic fallback.
›
d-ary heap
data-structures · low: Array heap with d children per node (d = 4 typical): half the binary heap's depth, siblings in one cache line, faster priority queues.
›
Drat proof certificates
optimization · low: DRAT and LRAT proofs emitted by SAT solvers and checked independently
Two watched literals
optimization · low: Unit propagation for SAT that watches just two literals per clause, so backtracking costs nothing and long clauses are rarely touched.
›
Arena allocator
systems · low: Allocate by bumping a pointer through big chunks and free everything at once: a few instructions per allocation for objects sharing a lifetime.
›
Code coverage instrumentation
compilers · low: Insert counters into compiled code to record which blocks, edges or lines ran; a spanning tree of the control-flow graph cuts the counters needed.
›
Fast hash functions
data-structures · low: Non-cryptographic hashes built from 64×64→128-bit multiplies and xor-shifts; pick by key size, trust level and whether the hash is persisted.
›
Sanitizers
security · low: ASan/UBSan/TSan shadow memory and instrumentation to catch memory bugs
Cgroups and namespaces
hardware-os · low: Linux namespaces limit what a process can see; cgroup v2 limits and accounts what it may use. Containers, sandboxes and job schedulers are built from the two.
›
Overlay filesystem
hardware-os · low: Union mounts (overlayfs) stacking read-only layers under a writable layer
Least privilege and isolation
security · low: Assume every component will be compromised and limit what it can then reach: narrow identities, separate accounts, sandboxed processes.
›
Seccomp bpf
security · low: Syscall filtering with seccomp BPF programs
Deterministic serialization
finance · low: Canonical byte encodings (RLP, SSZ, canonical CBOR) so every node hashes identical bytes
Tar archive format
storage · low: Ustar/pax tar headers and streaming archives
Object storage
cloud · low: S3-compatible blob storage at cents per GB-month with 11 nines durability; pick by egress price, request price and latency, not by storage price alone.
›
Copy on write snapshots
storage · low: Point-in-time snapshots by sharing pages/extents and copying only on write
Failure bisection
search-sort · low: Binary search over commits, batches or inputs to isolate a failure
Transparent interception
networking · low: Redirect traffic to a local proxy (iptables TPROXY/REDIRECT, eBPF) without app changes
Secrets management
security · low: Keep keys and passwords out of code and logs, give workloads short-lived identity instead of static keys, and make rotation routine.
›
Cron scheduling
systems · low: Cron expression parsing and next-fire-time computation, with catch-up and time-zone rules
AEAD (AES-GCM, ChaCha20-Poly1305)
security · low: Authenticated encryption that encrypts and detects tampering in one call; the only kind of symmetric encryption you should use.
›
ECDH key exchange (X25519, P-256)
security · low: Each side multiplies the other's public curve point by its own scalar and both get the same point; always validate the peer key and run the result through a KDF.
›
HKDF key derivation (extract-and-ex…
security · low: HMAC-based two-step key derivation: extract a uniform pseudorandom key from any secret, then expand it into as many context-bound keys as you need.
›
X509 certificates
security · low: Certificate chains, path validation, SANs, revocation and short-lived issuance
Aes key wrap
security · low: AES Key Wrap (RFC 3394/5649) and AES-GCM-SIV for deterministic, authenticated wrapping of key material
Csprng
security · low: OS-backed cryptographically secure random numbers (getrandom), and when a fast PRNG is not enough
Ebpf
hardware-os · low: Verified in-kernel programs on hooks (kprobes, XDP, tc) with maps
Ptrace process control
hardware-os · low: Ptrace: attach, read and write registers and memory, single-step, intercept signals
fsync, O_DSYNC and O_DIRECT
hardware-os · low: What fsync, fdatasync, O_DSYNC, O_DIRECT and F_FULLFSYNC really guarantee on Linux and macOS, and the exact call sequences for crash-safe files.
›
LRU and CLOCK
systems · low: LRU evicts the least recently used entry via hash map plus linked list; CLOCK approximates it with a reference bit, so hits take no lock.
›
S3-FIFO
systems · low: Three FIFO queues (small, main, ghost) that evict one-hit wonders quickly and keep reused objects; low miss ratios with no list moves on hits.
›
Control-flow graph
compilers · low: Split a linear instruction list into basic blocks and connect them by jumps; the graph every optimizer, SSA builder and dataflow pass walks.
›
Bit packing and PFOR
compression · low: Store blocks of integers with exactly b bits each and patch rare outliers separately (PFOR); the fastest integer codec family, billions of values per second.
›
Varint (LEB128)
compression · low: Variable-length integers in 7-bit groups with a continuation bit; small numbers take 1 byte, the wire format of Protobuf, WebAssembly and DWARF.
›
Merkle dag
data-structures · low: Content-addressed DAG of hashed nodes (git trees/commits) for dedupe and verifiable history
Fencing tokens
distributed · low: A number that grows with every lock grant and is checked by the protected resource, so a paused ex-holder's late write is rejected.
›
BFS and DFS
graphs · low: The two basic graph traversals; BFS gives hop distances and levels, DFS gives discovery/finish order for cycles, components and topological order.
›
Minimum spanning tree
graphs · low: Cheapest set of edges connecting all vertices; Kruskal sorts edges and joins components with union-find, Prim grows one tree, Boruvka merges in parallel rounds.
›
Union-find
graphs · low: Disjoint-set forest with union by size and path compression; merges sets and answers same-set queries in effectively constant time.
›
CRC32C checksums
hardware-os · low: The Castagnoli CRC-32 with dedicated instructions on x86 (SSE4.2) and ARMv8. It is the standard fast integrity check for storage blocks, logs and network frames.
›
SIMD programming
hardware-os · low: Process 4-16 lanes per instruction with AVX2, AVX-512 or NEON via Rust std::arch, with runtime dispatch and a portable fallback.
›
Sparse matrices (CSR)
numerics · low: Compressed sparse row stores only nonzeros as row pointers, column indices and values; SpMV streams them once, so it is memory-bandwidth bound.
›
Radix sort
search-sort · low: Non-comparison sort that distributes keys by 8-bit digits; several times faster than comparison sorts on large arrays of integers, floats or fixed-size keys.
›
Constant time code
security · low: Writing secret-dependent code without branches or memory lookups on secrets; constant-time compare and select
JSON Web Token (JWT)
security · low: A signed, URL-safe token carrying claims; the verifier's job is the checklist (pinned algorithm, key by kid, exp, aud, iss), not the format.
›
OAuth 2 and OpenID Connect
security · low: Delegated authorization (OAuth 2) and login on top of it (OIDC); use authorization code + PKCE for every user-facing client.
›
Slab allocator
systems · low: Pre-carve pages into equal-size slots per size class with an in-place free list: O(1) alloc and free, no external fragmentation, cache-warm reuse.
›
Copy for AI
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