page =
url = http://antirez.com
list of posts -
[EDIT! I'm reconsidering all this because Marc Gravell from Stack Overflow suggested that we could just switch protocol for backward compatibility per-connection, sending a command to enable RESP3. That means no longer need for a global configuration that switches the behavior of the server. Put in that way it is a lot more acceptable for me, and I'm reconsidering the essence of the blog post] A few weeks after the release of Redis 5, I’m here starting to implement RESP3, and after a few days of work it feels very well to see this finally happening. RESP3 is the new client-server protocol that Redis will use starting from Redis 6. The specification at https://github.com/antirez/resp3 should explain in clear terms how this evolution of our old protocol, RESP2, should improve the Redis ecosystem. But let’s say that the most important thing is that RESP3 is more “semantic” than RESP2. For instance it has the concept of maps, sets (unordered lists of elements), attributes of the returned data, that may augment the reply with auxiliary information, and so forth. The final goal is to make new Redis clients have less work to do for us, that is, just deciding a set of fixed rules in order to convert every reply type from RESP3 to a given appropriate type of the client library programming language.
I saw multiple users asking me what is happening with Streams, when they’ll be ready for production uses, and in general what’s the ETA and the plan of the feature. This post will attempt to clarify a bit what comes next. To start, in this moment Streams are my main priority: I want to finish this work that I believe is very useful in the Redis community and immediately start with the Redis Cluster improvements plans. Actually the work on Cluster has already started, with my colleague Fabio Nicotra that is porting redis-trib, the Cluster management tool, inside the old and good redis-cli. This step involves translating the code from Ruby to C. In the meantime, a few weeks ago I finished writing the Streams core, and I deleted the “streams” feature branch, merging everything into the “unstable” branch.
WARNING: Long pretty useless blog post. TLDR is that I wrote, just for fun, a text editor in less than 1000 lines of code that does not depend on ncurses and has support for syntax highlight and search feature. The code is here: http://github.com/antirez/kilo . Screencast here: https://asciinema.org/a/90r2i9bq8po03nazhqtsifksb For the sentimentalists, keep reading… A couple weeks ago there was this news about the Nano editor no longer being part of the GNU project. My first reaction was, wow people still really care about an old editor which is a clone of an editor originally part of a terminal based EMAIL CLIENT. Let’s say this again, “email client”. The notion of email client itself is gone at this point, everything changed. And yet I read, on Hacker News, a number of people writing how they were often saved by the availability of nano on random systems, doing system administrator tasks, for example. Nano is also how my son wrote his first program in C. It’s an acceptable experience that does not require past experience editing files.
I’m spending days trying to get a couple of APIs right. New APIs about modules, and a new Redis data type. I really mean it when I say *days*, just for the API. Writing drafts, starting the implementation shaping data structures and calls, and then restarting from scratch to iterate again in a better way, to improve the design and the user facing part. Why I do that, delaying features for weeks? Is it really so important? Programmers are engineers, maybe they should just adapt to whatever API is better to export for the system exporting it.
Lua scripting is probably the most successful Redis feature, among the ones introduced when Redis was already pretty popular: no surprise that a few of the things users really want are about scripting. The following two features were suggested multiple times over the last two years, and many people tried to focus my attention into one or the other during the Redis developers meeting, a few weeks ago. 1. A proper debugger for Redis Lua scripts. 2. Replication, and storage on the AOF, of Lua scripts as a set of write commands materializing the *effects* of the script, instead of replicating the script itself as we normally do.
I’m back from Paris, DotScale 2015 was a very interesting conference. Before leaving I was working on Sentinel in the context of the unstable branch: the work was mainly about connection sharing. In short, it is the ability of a few Sentinels to scale, monitoring many masters. Before to leave, and now that I’m back, I tried to “secure” a set of features that will be the basis for Redis 3.2. In the next weeks I’ll be focusing developing these features, so I thought it’s worth to share the list with you ASAP.
Redis Cluster is finally on its road to reach the first stable release in a short timeframe as already discussed in the Redis google group [1]. However despite a design never proposed for the implementation of Redis Cluster was analyzed and discussed at long in the past weeks (unfortunately creating some confusion: many people, including notable personalities of the NoSQL movement, confused the analyzed proposal with Redis Cluster implementation), no attempt was made to analyze or categorize Redis Cluster itself.
One of the steps to reach the goal of providing a "testable" Redis Cluster experience to users within a few weeks, is some serious testing that goes over the usual "I'm running 3 nodes in my macbook, it works". Finally this is possible, since Redis Cluster entered into the "refinements" stage, and most of the system design and implementation is in its final form already. In order to perform some testing I assembled an environment like that: * Hardware: 6 real computers: 2 macbook pro, 2 macbook air, 1 Linux desktop, 1 Linux tiny laptop called EEEpc running with a single core at 800Mhz.
# Software defined radio is cool About one week ago I received my RTLSDR dongle, entering the already copious crew of software defined radio enthusiasts. It's really a lot of fun, for instance from my home that is at about 10 km from the Catania Airport I can listen the tower talking with the aircrafts in the 118.700 Mhz frequency with AM modulation, however because of lack of time I was not able to explore this further until the past Sunday. My Sunday goal was to use the RTLSDR to see if I was able to capture some ADS-B message from the aircrafts lading or leaving from the airport. Basically ADS-B is a security device that is installed in most aircrafts that is used for collision avoidance and other stuff like this. Every aircraft broadcasts informations about heading, speed, altitude and so forth.
[EDIT! I'm reconsidering all this because Marc Gravell from Stack Overflow suggested that we could just switch protocol for backward compatibility per-connection, sending a command to enable RESP3. That means no longer need for a global configuration that switches the behavior of the server. Put in that way it is a lot more acceptable for me, and I'm reconsidering the essence of the blog post] A few weeks after the release of Redis 5, I’m here starting to implement RESP3, and after a few days of work it feels very well to see this finally happening. RESP3 is the new client-server protocol that Redis will use starting from Redis 6. The specification at https://github.com/antirez/resp3 should explain in clear terms how this evolution of our old protocol, RESP2, should improve the Redis ecosystem. But let’s say that the most important thing is that RESP3 is more “semantic” than RESP2. For instance it has the concept of maps, sets (unordered lists of elements), attributes of the returned data, that may augment the reply with auxiliary information, and so forth. The final goal is to make new Redis clients have less work to do for us, that is, just deciding a set of fixed rules in order to convert every reply type from RESP3 to a given appropriate type of the client library programming language.
I saw multiple users asking me what is happening with Streams, when they’ll be ready for production uses, and in general what’s the ETA and the plan of the feature. This post will attempt to clarify a bit what comes next. To start, in this moment Streams are my main priority: I want to finish this work that I believe is very useful in the Redis community and immediately start with the Redis Cluster improvements plans. Actually the work on Cluster has already started, with my colleague Fabio Nicotra that is porting redis-trib, the Cluster management tool, inside the old and good redis-cli. This step involves translating the code from Ruby to C. In the meantime, a few weeks ago I finished writing the Streams core, and I deleted the “streams” feature branch, merging everything into the “unstable” branch.
WARNING: Long pretty useless blog post. TLDR is that I wrote, just for fun, a text editor in less than 1000 lines of code that does not depend on ncurses and has support for syntax highlight and search feature. The code is here: http://github.com/antirez/kilo . Screencast here: https://asciinema.org/a/90r2i9bq8po03nazhqtsifksb For the sentimentalists, keep reading… A couple weeks ago there was this news about the Nano editor no longer being part of the GNU project. My first reaction was, wow people still really care about an old editor which is a clone of an editor originally part of a terminal based EMAIL CLIENT. Let’s say this again, “email client”. The notion of email client itself is gone at this point, everything changed. And yet I read, on Hacker News, a number of people writing how they were often saved by the availability of nano on random systems, doing system administrator tasks, for example. Nano is also how my son wrote his first program in C. It’s an acceptable experience that does not require past experience editing files.
I’m spending days trying to get a couple of APIs right. New APIs about modules, and a new Redis data type. I really mean it when I say *days*, just for the API. Writing drafts, starting the implementation shaping data structures and calls, and then restarting from scratch to iterate again in a better way, to improve the design and the user facing part. Why I do that, delaying features for weeks? Is it really so important? Programmers are engineers, maybe they should just adapt to whatever API is better to export for the system exporting it.
Lua scripting is probably the most successful Redis feature, among the ones introduced when Redis was already pretty popular: no surprise that a few of the things users really want are about scripting. The following two features were suggested multiple times over the last two years, and many people tried to focus my attention into one or the other during the Redis developers meeting, a few weeks ago. 1. A proper debugger for Redis Lua scripts. 2. Replication, and storage on the AOF, of Lua scripts as a set of write commands materializing the *effects* of the script, instead of replicating the script itself as we normally do.
I’m back from Paris, DotScale 2015 was a very interesting conference. Before leaving I was working on Sentinel in the context of the unstable branch: the work was mainly about connection sharing. In short, it is the ability of a few Sentinels to scale, monitoring many masters. Before to leave, and now that I’m back, I tried to “secure” a set of features that will be the basis for Redis 3.2. In the next weeks I’ll be focusing developing these features, so I thought it’s worth to share the list with you ASAP.
Redis Cluster is finally on its road to reach the first stable release in a short timeframe as already discussed in the Redis google group [1]. However despite a design never proposed for the implementation of Redis Cluster was analyzed and discussed at long in the past weeks (unfortunately creating some confusion: many people, including notable personalities of the NoSQL movement, confused the analyzed proposal with Redis Cluster implementation), no attempt was made to analyze or categorize Redis Cluster itself.
One of the steps to reach the goal of providing a "testable" Redis Cluster experience to users within a few weeks, is some serious testing that goes over the usual "I'm running 3 nodes in my macbook, it works". Finally this is possible, since Redis Cluster entered into the "refinements" stage, and most of the system design and implementation is in its final form already. In order to perform some testing I assembled an environment like that: * Hardware: 6 real computers: 2 macbook pro, 2 macbook air, 1 Linux desktop, 1 Linux tiny laptop called EEEpc running with a single core at 800Mhz.
# Software defined radio is cool About one week ago I received my RTLSDR dongle, entering the already copious crew of software defined radio enthusiasts. It's really a lot of fun, for instance from my home that is at about 10 km from the Catania Airport I can listen the tower talking with the aircrafts in the 118.700 Mhz frequency with AM modulation, however because of lack of time I was not able to explore this further until the past Sunday. My Sunday goal was to use the RTLSDR to see if I was able to capture some ADS-B message from the aircrafts lading or leaving from the airport. Basically ADS-B is a security device that is installed in most aircrafts that is used for collision avoidance and other stuff like this. Every aircraft broadcasts informations about heading, speed, altitude and so forth.