Great write-up. As a side note (not a Googler myself and this is 100% my opinion) Lalit’s team was hiring in London, UK. If you are interested in working in low level performance tools, this might be a very cool opportunity!
Wondering to what degree this was done to support Anthropic’s web crawler. Would assume that having a whole JS runtime rather than just a HTTP client could be rather useful. Just hypothesising here, no clue what they use for their crawler.
I am incredibly happy that Apple has added MTE support to the latest iPhones and perhaps the M5 chips as well (?). If that’s the case I don’t think any other personal computers have anything close to Apple machines in terms of memory safety and related topics (Secure Enclave etc).
Hope other vendors will ship MTE in their laptop and desktop chips soon enough. While I’m very positive about x86_64 adding support for this (ChkTag), it’ll definitely take a while…
In my opinion a worthwhile enough reason to upgrade but feels like a waste given my current devices work great.
Haven’t had the chance to play with WezTerm just yet but wanted to share that the author is an incredibly smart, friendly, and humble.
Had the opportunity to work on a project together at work some years back and I can only aspire to be 1/10th as good of an engineer as him. A true hacker.