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Crafting Interpreters: Closures
As the man said, for every complex problem there’s a simple solution, and it’s wrong.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 662 posts.
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Julia 1.6: what has changed since Julia 1.0?
Julia 1.0 came out well over 2 years ago. Since then a lot has changed and a lot hasn’t. Julia 1.0 was a commitment to no breaking changes, but that is not to say no new features have been added to the language.
543
I wrote a self-hosting C compiler in 40 days (2015)
I wrote a self-hosting C compiler which I named 8cc in 40 days. This is a log when I was writing it from scratch by myself in 2012. The code and its history are available at GitHub .
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C23 is finished: Here is what is on the menu
It’s That Blog Post. The release one, where we round up all the last of the features approved since the last time I blogged. If you’re
545
The Go runtime scheduler's way of dealing with system calls
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
546
The Registers of Rust
It’s been nearly two and half years since I was an active contributor to the Rust project. There are some releases that I’ve been very excited about since then, and I’m heartened by Niko’s recent blog post emphasizing stability and polish over grand new projects. But I’ve also felt a certain apprehension at a lot of…
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Introduction to Go Modules
Random thoughts
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When FFI Function Calls Beat Native C
Over on GitHub, David Yu has an interesting performance benchmark for function calls of various Foreign Function Interfaces ( FFI ):
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John Carmack on Functional Programming in C++ (2018)
ps aux | more
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Cancellations in async Rust
Correctness in the face of cancellations: a written version of my talk at RustConf 2025.
553
Zig's Lovely Syntax
It's a bit of a silly post, because syntax is the least interesting detail about the language, but, still, I can't stop thinking how Zig gets this detail just right for the class of curly-braced languages, and, well, now you'll have to think about that too.
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Why Clojure? (2010)
I have recently become quite an enthusiast for the language Clojure . But why? Why would someone who has spent the last 30 years programmi...
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A Quick Comparison of Nim vs. Rust
Arthur’s thoughts on coding, software engineering, and other interesting things.
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JavaScript is Not Web Assembly
Writing and Stuff from Isaac Z. Schlueter
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Objectivist C
Although academic computer scientists have generally dismissed Objectivist-C, it has a zealous following among self-taught programmers and college sophomores.
559
Lisping at JPL Revisited
It has been over 20 years since I wrote " Lisping at JPL ", half memoir and half geeky screed (and all of it half-baked) about how an obscur...
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Pointers in C (2010)
This document comes with a companion example program, available as one file or as multiple files (zipped) .
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Using unwrap() in Rust is okay
One day before Rust 1.0 was released, I published a blog post covering the fundamentals of error handling . A particularly important but small section buried in the middle of the article is named “ unwrapping isn’t evil ”. That section briefly described that, broadly speaking, using unwrap() is okay if it’s in…
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Great Works in Programming Languages (2004)
In September, 2004, I posted a query to the Types list asking people to name the five most important papers ever written in the area of programming languages. This page collects the responses I received. (A few are missing because I am still tracking down bibliographic information.)
563
Why many developers still prefer Objective-C to Swift
Lack of ABI stability, slow compile times, poor Xcode support, and more hold Swift back
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Key differences between Python 2.7.x and Python 3.x (2014)
Many beginning Python users are wondering with which version of Python they should start. My answer to this question is usually something along the lines…
565
What about K?
k is a family of concise, fast vector-oriented languages designed by Arthur Whitney . Calling k a “family” is deliberate; there is no single definitive k, but instead a sequence of slightly incompatible versions. If you decide to stick with k, you’ll see mentions of k4 , k5 etc. Exactly what those numbers mean aren’t…
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Why F# evangelism isn't working (2015)
If you skim this blog entry too quickly or just read the title, you might think I am someone who does not like F#. Nothing could be further from the truth. Over the last several months, I have become a big F# fan. It has become my preferred language for personal projects.
568
The borrow checker within
This post lays out a 4-part roadmap for the borrow checker that I call “the borrow checker within”. These changes are meant to help Rust become a better version of itself, enabling patterns of code which feel like they fit within Rust’s spirit , but run afoul of the letter of its law . I feel fairly comfortable with…
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Functional Programming using JavaScript
There is no clear, widely-accepted definition of Functional Programming. It is a collection of related featues which cohere well into a very useful style of programming.
570
Zig; what I think after months of using it
Ah, Zig . I have a love-hate relationship with this one. A “new” (reading: appeared a couple years ago , already — yes, already ), language with high ambitions. Zig was made to run at low-level, with a simple design to solve many problems C has (macros, allocators, error handling, more powerful types like baked-in…