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mark-probst

123 karma · joined July 9, 2012

http://schani.wordpress.com/
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mark-probst··on Tail-call optimization in C is relatively recent (2025)
- The vararg function doesn't even know exactly how many args it's been passed, it only knows a lower bound (the non-variable declared args). - The trampoline is another stack frame, so putting that in would make the tail call not "proper" anymore. You could still consume an unbounded amount of stack with tail-call-only recursion.

Maybe I misunderstand your idea?

mark-probst··on Tail-call optimization in C is relatively recent (2025)
> In 2001 Mark Probst implemented tail-call optimization in GCC

That's me.

The motivation back then was to allow compilers that target C to assume that tail calls will be "proper". That's different from an optimization, which is usually optional, and which compilers don't guarantee.

The LWN post briefly sketches why this is hard: C allows variable-argument functions (like printf) where only the caller knows for sure how many arguments it passed, which means that only the caller can clean up the stack, unless the stack frame size is also communicated, which "normal" C calling conventions don't do. But when the callee does a proper tail call, the stack frame that returns to the callee is not the stack frame that the callee originally sent. This is explained in more detail in my thesis starting on page 16: https://hostr.flingit.run/s/proper-tail-calls.pdf

mark-probst··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2024)
Glide | https://glideapps.com | Senior Platform Engineer, Data | Remote | Full Time

Glide is building a simpler, faster way for anyone to build custom software for their business without any technical or design skills. Tens of thousands of non-technical people use Glide to build apps to power their businesses, organizations, personal projects, and more.

Glide is looking for a Senior Platform Engineer to help evolve our data sources strategy, become more efficient with our infrastructure utilization as we scale, and achieve a high level of operational excellence for availability, security, and performance.

The ideal candidate has a specialty in provisioning and managing large-scale, persistent data sources (e.g., PostgreSQL, Apache Kafka, NATS, etc…) in a variety of cloud environments. They are comfortable evolving legacy services already in production by using progressive rollout techniques. And they leverage observability and appropriate testing to build confidence in a service.

Full description and application at: https://glideapps.com/jobs/senior-platform

mark-probst··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2024)
Glide | Principal Front-end Engineer | Remote | Full-time

Glide is creating a simpler, faster way for anyone to build custom software for their business, without any technical or design skills. Tens of thousands of non-technical people use Glide to build apps to power their businesses, organizations, personal projects, and more. As customers create apps to visualize, interact with, take action on, and analyze their growing data sets, we must keep this big picture in mind as we improve various levels of our engineering stack.

We're looking for a Principal Frontend Engineer to help evolve the Glide product from a single large React-based application to a modern distributed system. We have a large backlog of features and need to establish the next generation of our platform so we can serve our rapidly growing customer base.

The ideal candidate has experience planning, leading, and executing on large architectural efforts and has front-end design opinions forged from real world experience. They are highly productive engineers in their own right, but also level up their team with their technical leadership, clear communication, and mentorship.

More info: https://www.glideapps.com/jobs/principal-frontend

mark-probst··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2022)
Glide | Senior Frontend Engineer | Remote | Full-time

Glide's mission is to put the power, beauty, and magic of software development into the hands of a billion new creators. We're doing this by making software dramatically easier to build, with a spreadsheet-like programming model underneath easily configurable UI components.

We're looking for a Senior Frontend Engineer to help us push the limits of our Glide builder UI and glideapps.com.

You'll spend your time

- Creating amazing UI experiences across Glide Apps, Glide Pages, and glideapps.com

- Developing the Glide 'builder' environment where users create their apps.

This job might be perfect for you if...

- You have at least four years of experience as a software engineer

- You are passionate about software quality and correctness

- You're a great communicator

- You have a love and respect for customer-centric, design-driven software development

Glide's frontend is built in TypeScript and React.

https://www.glideapps.com/jobs/senior-frontend-engineer

mark-probst··on Launching Replay: The Time Travel Debugger for the Web
At Glide we've set up Replay for a few power users who report a lot of bugs. It works when you can onboard them and explain what's important in a usable replay, in particular that they have to do as little as possible to show the bug, and make it clear what the bug is. My guess is that the replays we'd get from regular users would be much less helpful, though I'd love to try.
mark-probst··on Launching Replay: The Time Travel Debugger for the Web
I've been using Replay for the past few months, and I miss it so much now whenever I can't use it for some reason (usually because I'm debugging backend stuff).

The main value propositions of Replay are:

* you can record a bug once and then debug it as often as you want, with exactly the same results * you can share that recording with somebody else who might have more knowledge about the bug * you can time travel within the recording when debugging

All three of these are game-changers.

mark-probst··on gRPC benchmark results
But look at 95% and 99% latency numbers - Rust is on top. And surprisingly (to me) Go totally tanks in 99% latency.
mark-probst··on Lisp in Forth
I'm the original author. Thank you for your explanations! I added a link to this post to the README.

I believe the reason I did all the stack juggling was because I wanted to write it "the Forth way", or maybe the "pure stack-based way", and using variables seemed like cheating.

I certainly won't be pursuing this further (I wrote it 20 years ago as a programming exercise), but I hope somebody will learn from your exposition :-)

mark-probst··on Lisp in Forth
Author here. I never benchmarked it, but probably not fast. This was just a fun programming exercise.
mark-probst··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (April 2021)
Glide (YC W19) | Multiple roles | REMOTE WORLD-WIDE | Full-time | https://glideapps.com

At Glide we believe that software development should be dramatically easier. We're starting by making it possible to build mobile apps from spreadsheets, without writing any code. If you want to help us bring software development to the masses, please apply. We don't care which languages or frameworks you're most familiar with—if you're passionate and willing to learn, we have no doubts that you'll be productive in our stack in no time.

We're currently hiring for multiple roles:

- Senior Backend Engineer: Connect Glide to more data sources and improve the performance of our data sync engine. https://www.glideapps.com/jobs/senior-software-engineer

- Senior QA Engineer: Build our testing capabilities and help ensure that apps never break. https://www.glideapps.com/jobs/senior-qa-engineer

- Senior Frontend Engineer: Help us develop the Glide 'builder' environment, where users build their apps. https://www.glideapps.com/jobs/senior-frontend-engineer

mark-probst··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (March 2021)
Glide (YC W19) | Multiple roles | REMOTE WORLD-WIDE | Full-time | https://glideapps.com

At Glide we believe that software development should be dramatically easier. We're starting by making it possible to build mobile apps from spreadsheets, without writing any code. If you want to help us bring software development to the masses, please apply. We don't care which languages or frameworks you're most familiar with—if you're passionate and willing to learn, we have no doubts that you'll be productive in our stack in no time.

We're currently hiring for multiple roles:

- Senior Backend Engineer: Connect Glide to more data sources and improve the performance of our data sync engine. https://www.glideapps.com/jobs/senior-software-engineer

- Senior QA Engineer: Build our testing capabilities and help ensure that apps never break. https://www.glideapps.com/jobs/senior-qa-engineer

- Senior Frontend Engineer: Help us develop the Glide 'builder' environment, where users build their apps. https://www.glideapps.com/jobs/senior-frontend-engineer

mark-probst··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (February 2021)
Glide (YC W19) | Multiple roles | Remote | Full-time | https://glideapps.com

At Glide we believe that software development should be dramatically easier. We're starting by making it possible to build mobile apps from spreadsheets, without writing any code. If you want to help us bring software development to the masses, please apply. We don't care which languages or frameworks you're most familiar with—if you're passionate and willing to learn, we have no doubts that you'll be productive in our stack in no time.

We're currently hiring for multiple roles:

- Senior Integrations Engineer: Connect Glide to more data sources and improve the performance of our data sync engine. https://www.glideapps.com/jobs/senior-software-engineer

- Senior QA Engineer: Build our testing capabilities and help ensure that apps never break. https://www.glideapps.com/jobs/senior-qa-engineer

- Senior Frontend Engineer: Help us develop the Glide 'builder' environment, where users build their apps. https://www.glideapps.com/jobs/senior-frontend-engineer

- Research Engineer: Build the path to the future of Glide. https://www.glideapps.com/jobs/research-engineer

mark-probst··on Siteswap
Hard agree. Talent is overrated.
mark-probst··on Siteswap
My favorite siteswap that I can actually juggle (once or twice in a row) is 97531. That's 5 balls thrown in such a way that they reverse order - the first ball comes back last and vice versa. Also, all the balls reach their apex at the same time, making a vertical line of balls.

Here's me doing it, twice in a row, a long time ago: http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/schani/jugglevids/97531twic...

mark-probst··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (October 2020)
Glide (YC W19) | Senior Product Designer | SF, once it's safe | Full-time | https://glideapps.com

We're looking for a Senior Product Designer who has worked on technical products. Glide is building the tool that will create 1 billion new developers by 2030. The design challenge in front of us is turning the complexity of software development into a simple, intuitive, and powerful interface that anyone can use.

[https://www.glideapps.com/jobs/senior-product-designer-san-f...

mark-probst··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (September 2020)
Glide (YC W19) | Senior software engineer | REMOTE or SF | Full-time | https://glideapps.com**

At Glide we believe that software development should be dramatically easier. We're starting by making it possible to build mobile apps from spreadsheets, without writing any code. If you want to help us bring software development to the masses, please apply. We don't care which languages or frameworks you're most familiar with - if you're passionate and willing to learn, we have no doubts that you'll be productive in our stack in no time.

https://www.glideapps.com/jobs/senior-software-engineer-san-...

Glide (YC W19) | Senior ops engineer | REMOTE or SF | Full-time | https://glideapps.com**

Glide makes it easy and fun for anyone to build apps without writing code, and without maintaining infrastructure. We do that by providing all that infrastructure, and it's growing, and needs help. If our mission motivates you, and you're experienced with maintaining and growing backend infrastructure, monitoring and automating everything, and implementing security, please talk to us!

https://www.glideapps.com/jobs/senior-ops-engineer-remote

Glide (YC W19) | Senior Product Designer | SF, once it's safe | Full-time | https://glideapps.com**

We're looking for a Senior Product Designer who has worked on technical products. Glide is building the tool that will create 1 billion new developers by 2030. The design challenge in front of us is turning the complexity of software development into a simple, intuitive, and powerful interface that anyone can use.

[https://www.glideapps.com/jobs/senior-product-designer-san-f...

mark-probst··on Parsing S-expressions in C (2019)
I wrote a Lisp reader for C a long time ago: https://github.com/schani/lispreader

An interesting problem that came up was freeing deeply nested conses without overflowing the stack. I got a bug report about that from a user. They must have generated the structure in memory, because if they were reading it in, the reader would probably also have overflown the stack. In any case, the simple solution was to rotate the structure to be freed so that it can be freed without stack overflow or using an additional queue or stack:

https://github.com/schani/lispreader/blob/master/lispreader....

mark-probst··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (August 2020)
Glide (YC W19) | Senior software engineer | REMOTE or SF | Full-time | https://glideapps.com

At Glide we believe that software development should be dramatically easier. We're starting by making it possible to build mobile apps from spreadsheets, without writing any code. If you want to help us bring software development to the masses, please apply. We don't care which languages or frameworks you're most familiar with - if you're passionate and willing to learn, we have no doubts that you'll be productive in our stack in no time.

https://www.glideapps.com/jobs/senior-software-engineer-san-...

Glide (YC W19) | Senior ops engineer | REMOTE or SF | Full-time | https://glideapps.com

Glide makes it easy and fun for anyone to build apps without writing code, and without maintaining infrastructure. We do that by providing all that infrastructure, and it's growing, and needs help. If our mission motivates you, and you're experienced with maintaining and growing backend infrastructure, monitoring and automating everything, and implementing security, please talk to us!

https://www.glideapps.com/jobs/senior-ops-engineer-remote

Glide (YC W19) | Senior Product Designer | SF, once it's safe | Full-time | https://glideapps.com

We're looking for a Senior Product Designer who has worked on technical products. Glide is building the tool that will create 1 billion new developers by 2030. The design challenge in front of us is turning the complexity of software development into a simple, intuitive, and powerful interface that anyone can use.

https://www.glideapps.com/jobs/senior-product-designer-san-f...

mark-probst··on Ask HN: Who is hiring? (July 2020)
Glide (YC W19) | Senior software engineer | SF, once it's safe | Full-time | https://glideapps.com

At Glide we believe that software development should be dramatically easier. We're starting by making it possible to build mobile apps from spreadsheets, without writing any code. If you want to help us bring software development to the masses, please apply. We don't care which languages or frameworks you're most familiar with - if you're passionate and willing to learn, we have no doubts that you'll be productive in our stack in no time.

https://www.glideapps.com/jobs/senior-software-engineer-san-...

Glide (YC W19) | Senior ops engineer | SF or REMOTE | Full-time | https://glideapps.com

Glide makes it easy and fun for anyone to build apps without writing code, and without maintaining infrastructure. We do that by providing all that infrastructure, and it's growing, and needs help. If our mission motivates you, and you're experienced with maintaining and growing backend infrastructure, monitoring and automating everything, and implementing security, please talk to us!

https://www.glideapps.com/jobs/senior-ops-engineer-remote

Glide (YC W19) | Senior Product Designer | SF, once it's safe | Full-time | https://glideapps.com

We're looking for a Senior Product Designer who has worked on technical products. Glide is building the tool that will create 1 billion new developers by 2030. The design challenge in front of us is turning the complexity of software development into a simple, intuitive, and powerful interface that anyone can use.

https://www.glideapps.com/jobs/senior-product-designer-san-f...

mark-probst··on Launch HN: Glide (YC W19) – Mobile Apps from Google Sheets
Yes, notifications is something we're working on right now.
mark-probst··on Launch HN: Glide (YC W19) – Mobile Apps from Google Sheets
We haven't thought about that much yet. What kinds of apps are you thinking of building?
mark-probst··on Launch HN: Glide (YC W19) – Mobile Apps from Google Sheets
For now it's mostly read-only. We have one component that lets you edit free-form text that syncs back to the sheet, called Notes. We also have a Comments component and a Chat tab, which don't sync to the sheet. And our big focus right now is to add more CRUD functionality.
mark-probst··on Launch HN: Glide (YC W19) – Mobile Apps from Google Sheets
I see. We're actively working on features to make that possible. We should have something for you in March :-)
mark-probst··on Launch HN: Glide (YC W19) – Mobile Apps from Google Sheets
Thank you!

Do you mean uploads from the app? What kinds of media are you interested in, specifically? Right now we don't handle that, but we'd love to learn more about what you need.

mark-probst··on Launch HN: Glide (YC W19) – Mobile Apps from Google Sheets
That is a fair point. We do tell customers who approach us about it that we can't guarantee that the app stores will accept their apps, and if we think that their app won't be accepted we tell them that, too. A lot of businesses care more about internal distribution, though, like Enterprise in the iOS App Store.
mark-probst··on Launch HN: Glide (YC W19) – Mobile Apps from Google Sheets
Thank you Maneesh! Can't wait to see your new idea get off the ground!
mark-probst··on Launch HN: Glide (YC W19) – Mobile Apps from Google Sheets
Thank you!

We will add more options to customize the look of the apps. It's important to us not to overload users with fine-grained controls that require design expertise to get good-looking results, though.

mark-probst··on Launch HN: Glide (YC W19) – Mobile Apps from Google Sheets
Our early target market is small to medium businesses. Right now Glide is still rough around the edges, so being a little technical definitely helps, but we'll make it a lot easier to use. Right now we're charging monthly for apps that require sign-in, need to remove our branding, or need to be published to app stores. See https://www.glideapps.com/#pricing
mark-probst··on Launch HN: Glide (YC W19) – Mobile Apps from Google Sheets
Co-founder here. We propagate changes in the sheet to the app with about a 5 minute delay. Right now the app doesn't update automatically when it's running, but it will get the new data once it restarts. We'll obviously fix that.

Other authentication types are on our roadmap, but I can't give you a timeline.

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