Plurrrr

Solid-State Drives (SSDs) based on flash have largely replaced magnetic disks as the standard storage medium. From the perspective of a programmer, SSDs and disks look very similar: both are persistent, enable page-based access through file systems and system calls, and have large capacities.

However, there are also important differences, which become important if one wants to achieve optimal SSD performance. As we will see, SSDs are more complicated and their performance behavior can appear quite mysterious if one simply thinks of them as fast disks. The goal of this post is to provide an understanding of why SSDs behave the way they do, which can help creating software that is capable of exploiting them. (Note that I discuss NAND flash, not Intel Optane memory, which has different characteristics.)

Memory safety is a property of some programming languages that prevents programmers from introducing certain types of bugs related to how memory is used. Since memory safety bugs are often security issues, memory safe languages are more secure than languages that are not memory safe.

Memory safe languages include Rust, Go, C#, Java, Swift, Python, and JavaScript. Languages that are not memory safe include C, C++, and assembly.

Expectations were always going to be high for SwiftUI this year, but the team didn’t disappoint – they’ve shipped a massive collection of improvements and features, including a new AsyncImage view for loading remote images, swipe actions for list rows, pull to refresh, plus shorter, simpler APIs for common uses. Alongside huge improvements to Swift itself (see What's new in Swift 5.5 for more on that), this is another significant leap forward for SwiftUI and I’m really keen to dive in.