A collection of essays and notes from SpeakEZ's Lab
• Houston Haynes
The streaming question sits at the heart of systems programming. When data flows through a computation, the compiler must decide: should this materialize in memory, stream through a spatial pipeline, or remain suspended as a demand-driven thunk? Each …
• Houston Haynes
Two capabilities define the architectural foundation of the Fidelity framework: Deterministic Memory Management (DMM) Dimensional Type System (DTS) While each addresses distinct engineering challenges, their real power emerges from a unifying …
• Houston Haynes
Every .NET developer knows collections. List<T>, Dictionary<K,V>, arrays. They’re the bread and butter of everyday programming. You iterate, filter, map, and fold without thinking twice. But what if I told you that underneath these …
• Houston Haynes
Many programmer’s first program prints “Hello, World!” to the console. It’s a rite of passage, a proof of life, a single line that says “it’s real!” What that single line conceals holds the key to a new …
• Houston Haynes
There is a peculiar satisfaction in watching complex machinery disappear behind a simple interface. The best APIs feel inevitable, as though any other design would have been wrong. F#’s sequence expressions belong to this category. You write …
• Houston Haynes
There are only two hard things in computer science: cache invalidation and naming things. Phil Karlton’s quip has aged well, but the functional programming community might add a corollary: sometimes the name we pick makes things harder than …
• Houston Haynes
Every language that supports first-class functions faces the same question: where do captured variables live? Whether you’re writing Rust closures that require explicit lifetime annotations, Go functions that capture by reference and cause …
• Houston Haynes
When Haskell Curry formalized the technique that now bears his name, he established a principle that would shape functional programming for decades: every function takes exactly one argument. What appears to be a multi-parameter function is actually …
• Houston Haynes
Most F# developers take type inference for granted. You write let x = 5 and the compiler knows it’s an integer. You don’t annotate every binding; you let the compiler figure out what it can from context. This small convenience accumulates …
• Houston Haynes
When the Mars Climate Orbiter burned up in the Martian atmosphere on September 23, 1999, it wasn’t because of faulty sensors or software bugs in the traditional sense. The spacecraft’s navigation software expected metric units while …
• Houston Haynes
There’s a particular kind of frustration that comes from watching a progress bar crawl across your screen while an Electron app loads its bundled Chromium instance. Somewhere in those three-plus seconds of initialization, a complete web browser …
• Houston Haynes
In March 2025, we published Building Firefly With Alloy, describing a BCL-free F# standard library that would provide native type implementations. The vision was compelling: preserve familiar APIs like Console.WriteLine while compiling to fat …
• Houston Haynes
When we began designing the Fidelity framework, we encountered a fundamental architectural question that would shape every subsequent decision: how do you build a type system that serves both the embedded developer programming a Cortex-M0 with 32 …
• Houston Haynes
Nearly two years ago, F# Goes Metal laid out a vision for running F# on bare-metal microcontrollers with zero runtime cost. The core proposition remains unchanged: developers should be able to write expressive, idiomatic F# code that compiles to …
• Houston Haynes
In a universally contested future, every cryptographic operation rests on a single foundation: entropy. The keys that protect communications, the nonces that prevent replay attacks, the seeds that initialize secure protocols; all derive their …
• Houston Haynes
In today’s “move fast and break things” culture, its gratifying to find quiet, principled work win the day. Don Syme designed F# quotations, active patterns, and computation expressions over a decade ago; they now form the …
• Houston Haynes
IEEE 754 floating point has served numerical computing well for four decades. It emerged from genuine chaos: IBM used hexadecimal floating-point, CDC and Cray used ones’ complement representation (admitting both +0 and -0), and DEC’s VAX …
• Houston Haynes
Every compiler must eventually answer a fundamental question: how do you represent “the rest of the computation”? In imperative languages, this question rarely surfaces explicitly. The call stack handles it through it’s own …
• Houston Haynes
Between the server-scale memory coherence of CXL and the constrained world of edge accelerators lies a third tier of heterogeneous computing that is becoming more common: the unified memory SoC. This is not simply a GPU bolted onto a laptop. It …
• Houston Haynes
Gerard Huet’s 1997 paper on “The Zipper” introduced a method for navigating immutable tree structures by carrying context during traversal. For years many have viewed this as a purely functional curiosity. But in the architecture of …
• Houston Haynes
The core message of this talk: functional programming isn’t waiting to win some future popularity contest. It already won, decades ago, by embedding itself in the tools that run the world’s businesses. Every actuary building a risk model, …
• Houston Haynes
A compiler without proper tooling is like a sports car without a steering wheel: basically, what would be the point without it? As the Fidelity Framework matures from experimental compiler to practical development platform, we face a critical …
• Houston Haynes
This entry builds on concepts explored in Unexpected Fusion, which outlines how F# synthesizes OCaml’s type-safe functional programming with Erlang’s actor model through the MailboxProcessor primitive. That foundation informs the unified …
• Houston Haynes
* The title of this blog entry is an homage to Lexicon of Musical Invective by Nicholas Slonimsky. The Vocabulary of Doom Every generation produces confident predictions about how new technologies will either revolutionize or destroy the current …
• Houston Haynes
Reactive programming has become essential infrastructure for modern applications. From browser interfaces responding to user input to distributed systems coordinating state across nodes, the ability to propagate changes through a dependency graph …
• Houston Haynes
This entry is part of the 2025 F# Advent Calendar, a month-long celebration across the community. It’s a privilege to contribute alongside so many talented developers who share a passion for this ever-growing language ecosystem. Why ‘Ask …
• Houston Haynes
Tristan Harris recently sat down with Steven Bartlett on Diary of a CEO to discuss the trajectory of artificial intelligence. The conversation covers familiar ground for those tracking AI discourse: existential risk, racing dynamics, job …
• Houston Haynes
The term “artificial intelligence” has died before. Not the research, not the mathematics, not the engineering; the term itself became so poisonous in funding circles that researchers learned to describe their work with any vocabulary …
• Houston Haynes
The MLIR ecosystem has a dirty secret: its testing infrastructure is built on regex and prayer. While MLIR itself represents a triumph of progressive lowering and type-safe compilation, the tools used to verify its correctness, lit and FileCheck, …
• Houston Haynes
Conclave: A sequestered location for confidential deliberation and decision-making. Organizations considering agentic AI systems face a multitude of challenges. The first hurdle is how to build and deploy agentic systems in a way that they can …
• Houston Haynes
Post-quantum cryptography is coming, and companies that host “contested” technology environments need to prepare. Beneath this assertion lies a troubling assumption, that we can predict which environments will be “contested” …
• Houston Haynes
The SPEC stack represents our vision for a unified approach to principled web development, centering on syntactic uniformity, compile-time transformation, and edge-native deployment. By bringing together SolidJS, Partas.Solid’s broad bindings, …
• Houston Haynes
The convergence of Partas.Solid (web site) and D3.js represents a strategic opportunity to establish a new paradigm for data visualization in functional web development. This proposal outlines a principled architectural approach that would leverage …
• Houston Haynes
Victor is our idea of a command-line tool which merges static site generation traditions with modern reactive web development. Drawing inspiration from Hugo’s templating philosophy, Fornax’s F# script architecture (itself …
• Houston Haynes
AI’s Berlin Wall In our exploration of neuromorphic computing, we examined how specialized hardware might finally deliver on AI’s efficiency promises. But hardware alone cannot solve AI’s most fundamental limitation: the artificial …
• Houston Haynes
The story of distributed systems in F# begins with two distinct programming traditions that converge in F# in unique ways. From OCaml came the functional programming foundation and type system rigor. From Erlang came the mailboxprocessor and with it …
• Houston Haynes
The technology industry has developed an unfortunate habit of wrapping straightforward engineering advances in mystical language. When sites online boast of claims to “blur the lines between P and NP,” they’re usually describing …
• Houston Haynes
The actor model isn’t new. Carl Hewitt introduced it at MIT in 1973, the same year that Ethernet was invented. For fifty years, this elegant model of computation, where independent actors maintain state and communicate through messages, has …
• Houston Haynes
F#’s computation expressions represent one of the language’s crown jewels - a unified syntax that makes complex control flow feel as natural as writing straight-line code. Yet beneath this syntactic elegance lies a mathematical structure …
• Houston Haynes
If you haven’t discovered Super Productivity yet, you’re missing one of the most thoughtfully designed productivity tools in the open source ecosystem. This is more than a Pomodoro timer or simple to-do list. It’s a complete work …
• Houston Haynes
As we explored in our companion piece on CPU cache optimization, the Firefly compiler is being designed to perform sophisticated transformations that would align F# code with hardware memory hierarchies. When we consider GPU architectures, we …
• Houston Haynes
Modern computing systems present a fundamental paradox: while processor speeds have increased exponentially, memory latency improvements have been modest, creating an ever-widening performance gap. This disparity manifests most acutely in the cache …
• Houston Haynes
In a recent YouTube interview, Tri Dao, architect of Flash Attention and contributor to Mamba, delivered an insight worth exploring here: “If you’re a startup you have to make a bet … you have to make an outsized bet” [8:29]. …
• Houston Haynes
Rust’s trait system is often compared to Haskell’s type classes, suggesting that Rust has successfully brought type class polymorphism to systems programming. While Rust’s traits are indeed inspired by type classes and provide …
• Houston Haynes
The blog post “Abstract Machine Models - Also: what Rust got particularly right” makes a compelling case for Abstract Machine Models (AMMs) as a missing conceptual layer between computer science and hardware. The author, reflecting on a …
• Houston Haynes
The challenge of binding F# to C++ libraries has historically forced developers into compromising positions: accept the limitations of C-style APIs, manually write error-prone binding code, or rely on runtime marshaling that imposes performance …
• Houston Haynes
The “AI industrial complex” in its current form is not sustainable. While transformers have delivered remarkable capabilities, their energy consumption and computational demands reveal a fundamental inefficiency: we’re fighting …
• Houston Haynes
The promise of edge computing for AI workloads has evolved from experimental optimization to production-ready enterprise architecture. What began as our exploration of WASM efficiency gains has matured into a comprehensive platform strategy that …
• Houston Haynes
Compiler development differs fundamentally from application development. Where application code flows in one direction from input to output, compiler pipelines are multi-stage transformations where decisions at each layer cascade through everything …
• Houston Haynes
The Steam-Powered Illusion The current AI oligarchy’s greatest deception isn’t about capabilities; it’s about implementation. While hyperscalers tout their models as “flying cars” of intelligence, the reality behind the …
• Houston Haynes
A Confession and a Vision A personal note from the founder of SpeakEZ Technolgies, Houston Haynes I must admit something upfront: when I began design of the Fidelity framework in 2020, I was driven by practical engineering frustrations, particularly …
• Houston Haynes
Software verification has always forced a cruel choice: accept runtime overhead for safety checks, or trust that your optimizing compiler won’t break critical invariants. Traditional compilers treat proofs as obstacles to optimization, while …
• Houston Haynes
Every software engineering team knows the testing treadmill. Write code, write tests, run tests, fix failures, write more tests to catch what you missed, maintain those tests forever. We’ve accepted this as the calendar and staffing cost …
• Houston Haynes
The industry is witnessing an unprecedented $4 billion investment to finally set aside the 80-year-old Harvard/Von Neumann computer design pattern. Companies like NextSilicon, Groq, and Tenstorrent are building novel, alternative architectures that …
• Houston Haynes
In the landscape of modern compiler design, a fundamental tension exists between preserving the elegance of high-level abstractions and generating efficient machine code. The Fidelity framework confronts this challenge head-on. By leveraging a …
• Houston Haynes
The quantum computing landscape in 2025 presents both promising advances and sobering realities. While the technology has moved beyond pure research into early commercial deployments, it remains years away from the transformative applications often …
• Houston Haynes
The integration of reactive programming into the Fidelity framework presents a fascinating challenge at the intersection of practical engineering and algorithmic integrity. While exploring various reactive models, we discovered valuable insights from …
• Houston Haynes
Modern async and parallel programming presents an engineering challenge: we need both the performance of low-level control and the safety of high-level abstractions. Nearly 20 years ago, the .NET ecosystem pioneered the async/await syntactic pattern, …
• Houston Haynes
Modern processors are marvels of parallel execution. A typical server CPU offers dozens of cores, each capable of executing multiple instructions per cycle through SIMD operations. GPUs push this further with thousands of cores organized in warps and …
• Houston Haynes
When we set out to build Firefly, we faced a fundamental question that cuts to the heart of functional systems programming: how far down the compilation stack can we preserve the elegant abstractions that make F# powerful? Specifically, can delimited …
• Houston Haynes
In 1998, Andrew Appel published a paper that heralded a change to how we should think about compiler design. “SSA is Functional Programming” demonstrated that Static Single-Assignment form, the intermediate representation at the heart of …
• Houston Haynes
The computing industry stands at a fascinating juncture in 2025. After decades of general-purpose processor dominance that led to the accidental emergence of general purpose GPU, we’re witnessing what appears to be a reverse inflection point. …
• Houston Haynes
The Fidelity Framework faces a fascinating challenge: how do we identify opportunities for massive parallelism hidden within sequential-looking F# code? The answer lies in an elegant application of graph coloring to our Program Hypergraph (PHG), …
• Houston Haynes
The journey of building the Fidelity Framework has taught us that meaningful changes require careful conceptual positioning alongside technical innovation. When we first introduced the design of Firefly’s deterministic memory management …
• Houston Haynes
Software tools face an eternal tension: wait to build fast executables or speed up workflow at the cost of the end result. Traditional approaches have forced developers to choose between aggressive optimization (and long compilation cycles) that …
• Houston Haynes
A startup’s gene analysis samples nearly melted because someone confused Fahrenheit and Celsius in their monitoring system. A Mars orbiter was lost because of mixed metric and imperial units. Medication dosing errors have killed patients due to …
• Houston Haynes
While this idea might be met with controversy in the current swarm of AI hype, we believe that the advent of sub-quadratic AI models, heterogeneous computing, and unified memory architectures will show themselves as pivotal components to next …
• Houston Haynes
The software industry never stands still. While in most cases this translates to technological advance, it also brings change to safety, security and compliance. What was once considered rare practice in secure software development is rapidly …
• Houston Haynes
The AI industry stands at an inflection point. As detailed in our “Beyond Transformers” analysis, the convergence of matmul-free architectures and sub-quadratic models will lead a fundamental shift in how we build and deploy AI systems. …
• Houston Haynes
The world got a wake-up call this week due to Bloomberg’s investigation into how “tiny middlemen” in the SMS routing infrastructure can access two-factor authentication codes. For security professionals, this wasn’t surprising …
• Houston Haynes
The Fidelity framework’s Farscape CLI addresses a pressing challenge in modern software development: how to enhance the safety of battle-tested C/C++ tools without disrupting the countless systems that depend on them. Every day, organizations …
• Houston Haynes
🔄 Updated December 2025 This article has been revised to align with advances in Fidelity’s compiler architecture. Updates include the nanopass phase structure, soft-delete reachability semantics, library boundary classification, and integration …
• Houston Haynes
The cybersecurity landscape has shifted dramatically in recent years, with memory safety vulnerabilities accounting for approximately 70% of critical security issues in systems software. This reality has prompted governments and industries to mandate …
• Houston Haynes
The debate over higher-kinded types (HKTs) in F# reveals fundamental tensions between theoretical elegance and practical accessibility. This analysis examines these tensions through two lenses: first, Don Syme’s philosophical stance that has …
• Houston Haynes
In 1993, while the tech world marveled at the newly-freed World Wide Web and debated the coming “Information Superhighway,” a Canadian computer consultant published a three-page warning that everyone dismissed as alarmist. Peter de …
• Houston Haynes
The Firefly compiler represents a fundamental shift in how F# code gets compiled to native executables. Unlike traditional F# compilation that relies on pre-compiled assemblies and the .NET runtime, Firefly compiles F# directly to native code through …
• Houston Haynes
The Fidelity Framework and its ecosystem of technologies represent more than technical achievements, they embody our core values in executable form. Where our Compact establishes how people and groups interact within the SpeakEZ ecosystem, our …
• Assistant
As we’ve established in previous entries, FidelityUI’s deterministic memory approach provides an elegant solution for embedded systems and many desktop applications. But what happens when your application grows beyond simple UI …
• Houston Haynes
The Fidelity framework represents an ambitious project to bring F# to native compilation without runtime dependencies. One of the most challenging aspects of this endeavor is the treatment of asynchronous programming. This design document outlines …
• Assistant
The journey of creating a native UI framework for F# presents a fascinating challenge: how would we preserve the elegant, functional programming experience that F# developers love while compiling to efficient native code with deterministic memory …
• Houston Haynes
The future of AI inference lies not in ever-larger transformer models demanding massive GPU clusters, but in a diverse ecosystem of specialized architectures optimized for specific deployment scenarios. At SpeakEZ, we’re developing the …
• Houston Haynes
As a companion to our exploration of CXL and memory coherence, this article examines how the Fidelity framework could extend its zero-copy paradigm beyond single-system boundaries. While our BAREWire protocol is designed to enable high-performance, …
• Houston Haynes
At the intersection of two powerful but largely separate computing paradigms stands the Fidelity framework, a revolutionary approach to systems programming that re-imagines what’s possible when functional programming meets direct native …
• Houston Haynes
The “byref problem” in .NET represents one of the most fundamental performance bottlenecks in managed programming languages. While seemingly technical, this limitation cascades through entire application architectures, not only hijacking …
• Houston Haynes
The Fidelity framework introduces an approach to building desktop applications with F# that aims to enable developers to create native user interfaces across multiple platforms while preserving the functional elegance that makes F# special. Drawing …
• Houston Haynes
Note: This article was updated September 27, 2025, incorporating insights from recent research and a recent Richard Sutton interview that affirm many of the tenets we have put forward over the years. We’re considering designs with innovative …
• Houston Haynes
SpeakEZ’s Fidelity framework with its innovative BAREWire technology is uniquely positioned to take advantage of emerging memory coherence and interconnect technologies like CXL, NUMA, and recent PCIe enhancements. By combining BAREWire’s …
• Houston Haynes
Creating software with strong correctness guarantees has traditionally forced developers to choose between practical languages and formal verification. The Fidelity Framework aims to address this challenge through an integration of F# code, F* …
• Houston Haynes
Here at SpeakEZ we’re rethinking how developers interact with memory management in systems programming. The conventional wisdom suggests we face a stark choice: embrace the ubiquitous memory burdens of Rust or abdicate all memory concerns and …
• Houston Haynes
We at SpeakEZ have been working on the Fidelity framework for a while, and it’s been a journey to find the right balance of familiar conventions with new capabilities. Nowhere is that more apparent than in the async/task/actor models for …
• Houston Haynes
For .NET developers, the term “frontend” already carries rich meaning. It might evoke XAML-based technologies like WPF or UWP, the hybrid approach of Blazor, or perhaps JavaScript visualization frameworks such as Angular, Vue or React. …
• Houston Haynes
January 2026: This article has been retired. Alloy’s functionality has been absorbed into FNCS (F# Native Compiler Services) as compiler intrinsics. See Absorbing Alloy for the rationale and updated architecture. The promise of functional …
• Houston Haynes
The computing landscape has undergone seismic shifts over the past three decades, yet many of our foundational software platforms remain anchored to paradigms established during a vastly different technological era. Virtual machines and managed …
• Houston Haynes
The journey from managed code to native compilation in F# represents a significant architectural shift. As the Fidelity Framework charts a course toward bringing F# to new levels of hardware/software co-design, we face a fundamental question: how do …
• Houston Haynes
In the world of cryptography, a storm is brewing. Quantum computing, once a theoretical curiosity, has been steadily advancing toward practical reality. When sufficiently powerful quantum computers arrive, not if, but when, they will fundamentally …
• Houston Haynes
The computing landscape stands at an inflection point. AI accelerators are reshaping our expectations of performance while “quantum” looms as both opportunity for and threat to our future. Security vulnerabilities in memory-unsafe code …
• Houston Haynes
The Fidelity framework aims to create a novel approach to building desktop applications with F#, enabling developers to create native user interfaces across multiple platforms while preserving functional elegance. One of the key challenges in …
• Houston Haynes
🔄 Updated December 2025 This primer has been revised to reflect the current Fidelity architecture, including the nanopass compilation pipeline, the Alloy standard library, and named compiler components (Baker, Alex). For detailed treatments of …
• Houston Haynes
Erlang emerged in the late 1980s at Ericsson, during an epoch when distributed systems were in their infancy and reliability was becoming a critical concern in telecommunications. Born out of the practical need to build telephone exchanges that could …
• Houston Haynes
At SpeakEZ, we are working on transformative approaches to transfer learning that combine convolutional neural networks (CNNs) with Topological Object Classification (TopOC) methods. This memo outlines our design approach to creating …
• Houston Haynes
Note: This article was updated September 27, 2025, incorporating insights from recent research and a recent Richard Sutton interview that affirm many of the tenets we have put forward, including the content of this blog entry. In the world of …
• Houston Haynes
This entry examines the architectural rationale behind avoiding the creation of yet another managed runtime system, instead advocating for our actor-oriented approach. As computing platforms continue to diversify across embedded systems, mobile …
• Houston Haynes
The embedded systems industry has operated under a fundamental assumption for decades: achieving hardware control requires sacrificing high-level abstractions and type safety. This assumption has created a divide between embedded development and …
• Houston Haynes
In the evolving landscape of programming languages, Mojo has emerged as a fascinating experiment in bridging disparate worlds. Created by Chris Lattner, whose pioneering work on LLVM and MLIR has fundamentally transformed how we think about compiler …
• Houston Haynes
In our work to bring F# to systems programming, we’re pursuing a vision of deterministic memory management outside the familiar boundaries of managed runtimes. For developers who have only known automatic memory management as an omnipresent …
• Houston Haynes
The AI industry is experiencing a profound shift in how computational resources are allocated and optimized. While the last decade saw rapid advances through massive pre-training efforts on repurposed GPUs, we’re now entering an era where …
• Houston Haynes
A recent ONNX conference presentation reveals an illuminating reality about the current state of AI development infrastructure. In a Groq engineer’s talk on “How to Win Friends and Influence Hardware,” they describe an elaborate …
• Houston Haynes
Last year, we explored how F#’s type system could transform threshold signature security through FROST. Today, we’re tackling an even more challenging problem: the conspicuous absence of end-to-end encryption in group messaging. While …
• Houston Haynes
When Simon Peyton Jones, one of the creators of Haskell and a renowned researcher in functional programming, explains Excel, he frames it in a fascinating way: “the easiest way to get at functional programming is to think of …
• Houston Haynes
In the coming waves of “AI” innovation, the computing landscape will continue to fragment into an increasingly divergent array of hardware choices. From embedded microcontrollers to mobile devices, workstations, and accelerated compute …
• Houston Haynes
The Rust programming ecosystem has transformed how the software industry views systems programming. By pioneering its ownership system with “borrowing” and “lifetimes”, Rust brought compile-time memory safety into mainstream …
• Houston Haynes
The .NET platform introduced the concept of assemblies over two decades ago, a fundamental building block that has served as the cornerstone of .NET development since its inception in 2002. Assemblies, typically manifested as DLL or EXE files, …
• Houston Haynes
In the world of distributed systems, trust is fundamentally a mathematical problem. For decades, organizations have relied on single points of failure: a master key, a root certificate, a privileged administrator. But what if we told you that the …
• Houston Haynes
The software industry has perfected a peculiar form of value extraction that emerges not through direct coercion or byzantine contract provisions, but through the accumulated weight of community contributions that inadvertently reinforce ecosystem …
