REPL Yell!

Shed Load, Not Tears: Lessons from the GitHub Incident

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

What GitHub’s August 17 outage teaches about load shedding on shared, multi-tenant OpenShift clusters.

Minecraft running on SBCL using OpenLDK

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Minecraft and OpenJDK libs transpile to Common Lisp… and work.

The libffi plan cache is coming to GLib

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Christian Hergert wired the new ffi_call_plan API into GLib and made GClosure invocation up to 25 percent faster.

Performance improvements in libffi

Sat, 20 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

libffi re-derives the same argument layout on every call. A new API lets a caller build that layout once and reuse it, several times faster, with no writable-executable memory.

Mitigating Copy Fail Without a Reboot

Fri, 01 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A BPF LSM program that blocks CVE-2026-31431 at runtime.

libffi Lands in Node.js

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Node.js is shipping a built-in node:ffi module powered by libffi — a library I wrote 30 years ago.

Whistler for Observability in High-Performance Computing

Fri, 10 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Whistler just landed its first real-world user — tracing syscalls on a HPC cluster for finance.

Cash Money

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How many physical U.S. bills will be printed before January 2029, and how long will they stick around?

Whistler: Live eBPF Programming from the Common Lisp REPL

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Writing, compiling, loading, and querying eBPF programs in one Lisp form.

SBCL Fibers: Lightweight Cooperative Threads

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A draft design document describing lightweight userland cooperative threads for SBCL.

Bending the CLOS MOP for Java-Style Single Dispatch

Sun, 22 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

How I customized the CLOS Meta-Object Protocol in OpenLDK to replace PCL’s multi-dispatch machinery with a fast hash-table cache, taking Clojure bootstrap from 2h45m to 2 minutes 40 seconds.

cl-kawa: A Turducken of Programming Languages

Sat, 21 Feb 2026 00:00:00 +0000

cl-kawa nests Scheme inside Java inside Common Lisp: three language runtimes in a single SBCL process, no FFI or external JVM required.

That Time I Explained Open Source on MTV

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 18:00:00 +0000

MTV shut down its remaining music channels after 44 years. Here’s a memory from when I tried to explain Free and Open Source Software between Janet Jackson videos.

A Primer on Post-Quantum Cryptography in TLS

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

An introduction to post-quantum cryptography, ML-KEM, and how hybrid key exchange protects TLS connections against future quantum computer attacks.

Automatic TLS Certificates for Common Lisp with pure-tls/acme

Fri, 09 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

pure-tls now includes an ACME client for automatic Let’s Encrypt certificates, with seamless Hunchentoot integration.

From UBI to Distroless

Mon, 05 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Pre-built, distroless container images based on Red Hat UBI with Java, Node.js, and Python runtimes ready to go.

Building a TLS 1.3 Implementation in Pure Common Lisp

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I built pure-tls, a TLS 1.3 implementation in Common Lisp to test the limits of AI code generation for a niche language.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m Anthony Green, a Distinguished Solution Architect at Red Hat based in Toronto, Canada. I’ve been creating open source software since the mid-90s and still love it.

Notable Projects

libffi — I created this foreign function interface library back in 1996. It’s now embedded in Python, Ruby, Firefox’s JavaScript engine, OpenJDK, GNOME, Wayland, and the vast majority of Linux systems worldwide.

Moxie — An open source microprocessor architecture I designed, with implementations on FPGA platforms and in blockchain applications.