Nicholas Clark
Vienna, Austria
Summary
🤩
RockstarNicholas Clark is a seasoned systems programmer with 27 years of hands-on experience across Unix variants and diverse CPU architectures, who began coding on a ZX81 and taught himself C on an MVS mainframe. He excels at taking over legacy codebases—finding subtle bugs, squeezing out optimisations, and migrating messy systems while keeping the big-picture architecture in view. Nicholas writes code that is performant, maintainable, clear and concise, and he thinks several steps ahead when designing socket and low-level code. An active open-source maintainer, he is one of the top contributors to the Perl interpreter and has made impactful backend contributions to the Rakudo/Raku compiler and NQP projects. He prefers pragmatic tools—git and Postgres—and is comfortable remote-debugging exotic platforms from ARM and RISC-V to PA-RISC and SPARC. Based in Vienna, he brings rare depth in language internals and cross-platform portability that accelerates complex modernisations.
27 years of coding experience
German, French
Github Skills (12)
c1710
floating-point10
moarvm10
sprintf10
float3210
backend10
nqp10
c1110
back-end-development10
compiler-development10
raku10
javascript8
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
Raku/nqp
Feb 2014 - Jan 2022
NQP
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 review, 20 commits, 8 PRs in 8 years
Contributions summary:Nicholas primarily contributed to the core logic and functionality of the NQP project, as evidenced by the code changes in serialization, hyperbolic functions, and sprintf implementations. Their work included fixing a build issue related to serialization format version compatibility and eliminating unused hyperbolic functions. Furthermore, the user optimized the `sprintf` implementation, and developed a tool for more accurate floating-point formatting. The contributions directly impacted the efficiency and correctness of the Rakudo compiler infrastructure.
rakunqp
rakudo/rakudo
Nov 2012 - Jan 2022
🦋 Rakudo – Raku on MoarVM, JVM, and JS
Role in this project:Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:15 commits, 7 PRs, 17 comments in 9 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Nicholas contributed to the Rakudo Raku compiler by making several changes related to the MoarVM backend. Their work includes refactoring code for improved type safety, specifically by reducing the use of casts when working with MVMCollectable structures. They also addressed issues in the nativecall testing, ensuring accurate results on different architectures and implemented improvements for build processes to correctly handle signal exits. Additionally, the user removed obsolete code, reflecting their involvement in maintaining and modernizing the codebase.
rakudorakujavascriptmoarvmjvm
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