Ideas Weave Every Narrative with AI.
Duff’s Device is revered as the most elegant optimization in C history — a switch-case fused with a do-while loop to unroll iteration. But on the very systems it was designed for, it was often slower than the naive loop it replaced. The real lesson isn’t about cleverness. It’s about the discipline of benchmarking and the danger of revering patterns instead of measuring them.
The most fundamental rule of C programming—that every program needs a main() function—is a lie. It’s not the language, it’s the runtime. This article shows you how to bypass it, and why breaking the rules reveals the beautiful machinery beneath the abstraction.
Lua dominates embedded scripting, but for truly constrained systems — 10KB or less of free RAM — it’s overkill. Pico is a radical minimalist C VM that eschews garbage collection, modules, and coroutines to deliver a clean, embeddable scripting runtime. It’s not a Lua killer; it’s the tool Lua can never be for the edge.