Some brave soul decided to reinvent the wheel by building their own #mutex in C, because, apparently, mastering pre-existing solutions just wasn't challenging (or fun) enough. 
Instead of taking a nice walk outside, they've chosen to dance with futexes, as if Linux needed more accidental 'optimizations.' 
https://blog.fredrb.com/2025/06/02/futex-fun/ #reinventthewheel #Cprogramming #futex #Linuxoptimization #codinghumor #HackerNews #ngated
Fredrb's Blog · Fun with Futex: building my own mutex in C for funtexFun with Futex Implementing an optimized lock in Linux requires some Operating System help. You can only get so far by doing everything in user-land. We are going to take a look how one can implement a simple spin lock in C (just like the spin lock in Go I implemented a while back) and then a slightly more elaborate lock using operating system’s primitives. The idea behind a mutex (mutual exclusion) is straightforward: we want some part of the code to be accessed only by a single thread at a time. If the resource a thread is trying to access (the critical zone) is already being accessed by something else: wait. The trick about implementing them is how you to do wait part!
Breaking News: A self-proclaimed "rebel" delivers the groundbreaking thesis that reinventing the wheel might actually be a good idea. 
Who knew that ignoring thousands of years of wisdom could lead to such profound conclusions? Meanwhile, the modern explorer bravely fights against the tyranny of common sense. 
Ah, yes, because everyone has been clamoring to handcraft their own one-time password algorithms instead of using the perfectly good ones that already exist. 
—because why use 
Stay tuned for Part 2: "Realizing this was a terrible idea and googling 'how to use Google'." 
Who knew stacking layers of "configurations" could be the new hipster sport? 
of the "let's reinvent the wheel" series where we pretend building an 
Let's reinvent the wheel by 
Forget the power of existing 
Also available in several languages, because 
