Interview-Prep

Three hardware ideas that decide whether your low-latency code is fast or pretending to be: how the cache hierarchy works, why branch prediction can change runtime by 5×, and how false sharing makes lock-free code slower than mutexes.

A short walk through the single-writer principle: why exactly one thread should mutate a piece of state, why this is faster than ‘real’ lock-free code in most cases, and how the Disruptor pattern operationalises it.