Researcher and systems engineer
My name is Petr Balvín. I design processor cores, write language tooling, network protocols and scientific libraries; the work runs from silicon to theory. What I claim, I measure, and what I deliver has to stay readable without me.
Four rules the rest of this site grows out of: they decide how code is written here and how results are judged.
The material decides, not the impression. When what is required and what the material permits pull apart, the design starts exactly there; that is dialectical materialism in daily practice. What has proved itself holds until the day something better turns up.
I cannot take someone else's code on trust, because I have not read it and I do not answer for it. So the part I really need, I write myself; the standard library carries most of a project meanwhile.
Performance, power draw and correctness are proven by measurement, whether the subject is silicon, code or a protocol. An estimate is written down as a hypothesis, together with the procedure that would refute it. When a claim has not been measured, I do not make it.
Code, documentation, tests and measured numbers form one whole and ship together. The measure is plain: in ten years the project has to be readable, buildable and takable over without me.
Directions I have followed for years. Every public line heads for an artefact anyone can pick up and run: a tool, a service or a library.
Core protocols, numerics and toolchains have been written in C for so long that nobody so much as chooses it any more. The question I am testing is whether pure Go delivers the same reliability; an NFSv4.2 server and client without a single dependency has already stood up against the Linux kernel.
About the lineSame input, same number, every machine. In numerics that is not a given, but Tensor holds it in Go, without cgo. The next step is spreading a computation across machines so the result stays reproducible.
About the lineThe Plan 9 assembler is imprisoned inside the Go toolchain and has no tools of its own. I am pulling it out: one binary holding a formatter, a debugger and a language server for four architectures, its accuracy verified by differential testing against the Go toolchain.
About the lineThe modern web is written through a bundler, a transpiler and hundreds of packages. I am testing whether the platform suffices on its own: the proof is this site, two language editions and zero dependencies, built with JSbox.
About the lineA fifth line, logic in silicon, is private research for now; once it yields an artefact, it gets a card here too.
Reports from repairs and measurements: what failed, why, and what came of it. Every text carries the procedure and the data, so you can check the result yourself.
Bring me a problem from systems work, from research or from the open code. I read the message and I answer it myself.
Write to me