TIL: Apr 29, 2025 - Weekly Reading: Go ABI/GC hacks and MCP

These are some of the things I was reading this last week or so.

Programming

• Cheating the Reaper in Go – Miguel Young de la Sota

  This is an good post that build’s on Miguel’s previous post Things You Never Wanted To Know About Go Interfaces. It discusses how to implement an “arena” in Go, which is a memory management data structure that is useful for assigning objects to a specific region in memory which can be allocated and freed all at once when it’s no longer needed.

  I hadn’t heard of this data structure before, but it might be fun to try to implement in Rust later.

Model Context Protocol

• Introducing the Model Context Protocol – Anthropic

  This is a blog post introducing Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP). It’s used to allow you to set up data sources that can then be used to provide data to a AI model via a prompt’s context. MCP allows models to have a unified API to get data rather than having to build custom integrations for each data source.

  There are a bunch of reference MCP server implementations for things like git repositories, databases, etc. These servers seems a lot like LSP servers in how they could be used; at least by programmers for coding.

• pprofの結果を出力するMCPサーバーを作って自律的にパフォーマンス改善を行う (Japanese) – yudppp

  One related project that caught my eye was pprof-mcp-agent which is a MCP server that can be used to analyze performance Go programs by providing pprof profiles to AI models.

• A Deep Dive Into MCP and the Future of AI Tooling – Yoko Li (Andreessen Horowitz).

  I’m not a big fan of Andreessen Horowitz, but this is a good overview of MCP and how it was indeed inspired by LSP. It does a much better job than the Anthropic post of explaining the motivation behind MCP and showing some examples of how it could be used.

  It does indeed seem pretty powerful but I’m kind of skeptical when a VC company gets this excited about a technology. The kind of data that a AI model company could hoover up from MCP servers seems pretty scary to me.

• AI Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Security – Omar Santos (Cisco)

  This post outlines some of the security risks of using MCP servers. Since MCP servers can do just about anything there is a real risk of inadvertently doing something you didn’t intend to do. I’m not sure how prevalent fine-grained access control is in the MCP server implementations, but it seems like it would be a good idea if you could restrict the server to only a subset of what it’s actually capable of doing.