# Orson R. L. Peters

Hi, nice to meet you, my name is Orson Raphael Lennard Peters. I am a programmer, computer scientist, recreational mathematician, amateur musician and general all-around nerd. I was born in 1994 in Houston, Texas, but both my parents are Dutch and I’ve essentially lived my entire life in the Netherlands as well.

### Contact

If you are human you may contact me at firstnamelastname@gmail.com, or alternatively on Discord at orlp#012_, where the last digit is a zero.

## Projects

While most of my projects live and die as a private prototype, over the years I did publish some things:

• Pattern-defeating Quicksort, a sorting algorithm I invented and implemented in C++. Third party implementations of pdqsort are used as the default unstable sorting algorithms in Rust and Go.

• Glidesort, a stable sorting algorithm I invented and implemented in Rust up to ~4x faster than the default stable sorting algorithm for random data, and more for data with patterns. I presented glidesort at FOSDEM 2023.

• slotmap, a Rust library for safely allocating and referring to objects in ways not encapsulated by lifetimes. Sometimes referred to as a (generational) arena or bump allocator, it uses versioned keys and slots to prevent use-after-free bugs.

• peekread, a Rust library that allows you to peak ahead in a Read stream using a cursor without consuming the original stream.

• bunlink.vim, a Vim plugin that decouples the concept of ‘deleting a buffer’ from ‘closing a window’. This allows you to delete your buffers without destroying your windows/splits.

• num-ord, a Rust library for correctly comparing built-in numeric types, in a mathematically correct way without overflows. This is trickier than it might seem, blog post pending.

## Interests

I am interested in a lot of different things, including but not limited to sorting, hashing, hash tables/bloom filters, indexing, low-level optimization, compression, succinct data structures, error/erasure correction codes, programming language and algebra design, sound synthesis, encryption, quantum computing, distributed data structures and algorithms, actually… to save time, just assume I like most data structures and algorithms.

I like to cross the boundary between theory/research and application/engineering, solving hard problems, or not-so-hard problems with state-of-the-art solutions. Teaching others is also something I enjoy, having written 1400+ answers for a total of 110,000+ reputation on StackOverflow.

In my remaining free time I play classical and pop piano as well as a variety of video games, at least when I’m not busy being distracted by my two cats, Conway & Boole.

Copyright (c) 2023 Orson Peters

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