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Modern C is now feature complete
You find the latest version of my book at the usual place at This now contains all the material that I plan to put into it. New are “experience” parts about performance, function-like m…
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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Why Lisp Will Never Win (2003)
For 2003 OSCON I proposed to give nine five-minute talks in a 45-minute slot. To avoid confusing this with the real lightning talks sessions, Nat decided to call my talk ``Nine Views of Mark Jason Dominus''. At first I didn't like that title, which sounded too much like self-promotion. But I warmed up to it after a…
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So You Want To Optimize Ruby
I was recently asked for a list of
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Cuneicode, and the Future of Text in C
Following up from the last post, there is a lot more we need to cover. This was intended to be the post where we talk exclusively about benchmarks and numbers. But, I have unfortunately been perfectly taunted and status-locked,
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Programming with Nothing
I love Ruby! I’ve used it every day for years and I’m not sick of it yet. It’s an easy language to love: it’s expressive, flexible and syntactically beautiful ; it has a unique combination of useful features like mixins , metaclasses and blocks ; it comes with a useful core library and comprehensive standard library …
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The C++ Killers (Not You, Rust)
All the “C++ killers”, even these which I wholeheartedly love and respect like Rust, Julia, and D, help you write more features with fewer bugs, but they don't much help when you need to squeeze the very last FLOPS from the hardware you rent. As such, they don’t have a competitive advantage over C++. Or, for that…
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Revisiting Prechelt’s paper comparing Java, Lisp, C/C++ and scripting languages
In 1999, Lutz Prechelt published a seminal article on the COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM (October 1999/Vol. 42, No. 10) called Comparing Java vs. C/C++ Efficiency Differences to Interpersonal Differences , henceforth Java VS C , which seems to have later (March 2000) been expanded into a full paper, An empirical comparison…
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Resurrecting Fortran
We have finished the first chapter on a long journey of resurrecting Fortran: forming an initial core community of developers and users with enough momentum around the new Fortran website and projects at fortran-lang.org . There is still have a long way to go to, but this was a necessary (although not sufficient)…
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V8: a tale of two compilers
wingolog: article: v8: a tale of two compilers
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Sum Types Are Coming (2015)
Just as all mainstream languages now have lambda functions, I predict sum types are the next construct to spread outward from the typed functional programming community to the mainstream. Sum types are very useful, and after living with them in Haskell for a while, I miss them deeply when using languages without them…
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Are pointers and arrays equivalent in C? (2009)
Longer answer: it depends on what you mean by "equivalent". Pointer arithmetic and array indexing are equivalent. In other aspects, pointers and arrays are different.
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R programming for those coming from other languages
Things a programmer coming from another language needs to know about R, especially those things that might be most surprising
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Types as axioms, or: playing god with static types
A common perspective is that types are restrictions . Static types restrict the set of values a variable may contain, capturing some subset of the space of “all possible values.” Under this worldview, a typechecker is sort of like an oracle, predicting which values will end up where when the program runs and making…
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Compiler Design in C
Compiler Design in C Download a copy! My book Compiler Design in C is now, unfortunately, out of print. You can download a complete copy, with the above button (pdf 19.1Mb OCR/Searchable—thanks to Marvin Hernández for adding the OCR). If you don’t want to print it out (the book is 984 pages long), you can…
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From first principles: Why I bet on Scala.js
Three years ago, I downloaded the nascent Scala.js compiler and tried to use it on a toy project.
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An upgrade to attoparsec, Haskell parsing library: more speed, more power
I’m pleased to introduce the third generation of my attoparsec parsing library. With a major change to its internals, it is both faster and more powerful than previous versions, while remaining backwards compatible. Comparing to C Let’s start with a speed comparison between the hand-written C code that powers…
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Monads in JavaScript
Monad is a design pattern used to describe computations as a series of steps. They manage side effects in pure functional languages but can also be used in other languages to control complexity.
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How Python 3 Should Have Worked (2012)
As a workaday Python developer, it’s hard to shake the feeling that the Python 2 to 3 transition isn’t working. I get occasional requests to make my libraries work in 3 but it’s far from clear how to and when I try to look it up I find all sorts of conflicting advice, none of which sounds very practical.
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Understanding lvalues and rvalues in C and C++
The terms lvalue and rvalue are not something one runs into often in C/C++ programming, but when one does, it's usually not immediately clear what they mean. The most common place to run into these terms are in compiler error & warning messages. For example, compiling the following with gcc :
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IronRuby Manager Leaves Microsoft
Though Frank Sinatra says it best , “I’m leaving today” isn’t exactly accurate; my last day as a Microsoft employee was July 23rd, 2010. This post is almost two weeks delayed as Felicia and I have been on the road since the 26th, driving cross-country to the east coast; we also decided to leave Seattle in favor of New…
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JQuery is a monad
It’s said that every Haskell programmer writes their own monad tutorial, and with good reason: once you finally understand the definition and capabilities of a monad, you’ll be eager to…
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The Failure of Lisp? A Reply To Brandon Werner
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