Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 2,232 posts.
One of the most consistently popular posts on this blog has been my XKCDify post, where I followed in the footsteps of others to write a little hack for xkcd-style plotting in matplotlib. In it, I mentioned the Sketch Path Filter pull request that would eventually supersede my ugly little hack.
When writing lock-free code in C or C++, one must often take special care to enforce correct memory ordering. Otherwise, surprising things can happen. Intel lists several such …
A discussion of how Sorbet's type syntax came to be, the problems it solves, and how it could improve.
This post takes a short break from ASDL to expand on one of my Hacker News comments.
A computer scientist working in open source towards a more hopeful future.
A merge workflow for activating multiple branches simultaneously using Jujutsu, an alternative VCS to Git.
The talk I released today is called " Media for Thinking the Unthinkable ". It's the most personal talk I've given, in that it was driven by my own motivations as opposed to someone else's.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been devoting my free time to fleshing out the theory behind non-lexical lifetimes (NLL). I think I’ve arrived at a pretty good point and I plan to write various posts talking about it. Before getting into the details, though, I wanted to start out with a post that lays out roughly how…
It is thankfully common wisdom nowadays that documentation must be placed as near as possible to the code it documents, and should be fine-grained to a minimal unit of describability (the thing being documented). The practice provides numerous benefits to the codebase and project as a whole:
This is the Part 2 of a series. Feel free to read the prequel for more context: Building the fastest Lua interpreter automatically Building a good VM for a dynamic language takes a ton of engineerin
Linked lists look harmless until they start detonating your game at runtime. This is the bug pattern far too many programmers miss.
When you have to traverse some sort of a nested data structure (say, a binary tree), one approach is to create a stack that remembers where in the tree you are. Another, much more elegant approach, is to write the function recursively. A recursive function employs the machine stack used to implicitly implement…
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
These koans have been independently translated into Chinese (archived) , thanks to Wanzhang Sheng, and into Spanish (archived) , thanks to Daniel Campoverde Carrión.
I’m a huge fan of interactive programming (see: JavaScript , Java , Lisp , Clojure ). That is, modifying and extending a program while it’s running. For certain kinds of non-batch applications, it takes much of the tedium out of testing and tweaking during development. Until last week I didn’t know how to apply…
For a while I’ve been working on a garbage collector for Rust with Nika Layzell. I thought this would be a good time to talk of our design and …
First, I’m a human typing this post. I’m not going to tell you who I am. Sure, many will say that is cowardly and fair, but I actually don’t think it would bring much value. What matters more is that I describe why, and what I did and didn’t do during the last two weeks or so with the OpenClaw agent I set up, known as…
Here’s a fun bit of trivia: malloc on Linux never fails [due to the obvious cause]. In this post, we’ll show that this indeed is the case, and explore why…
After the last post about high performance, high level programming, Slava Pestov, of Factor fame, wondered whether it was generally true that “if you want good performance you have to write C…
1. Nobody really knows how to do it 2. If you think you have a reliable system for doing it, you're probably doing the computer's job -- "...
“Markdown” is the most commonly used lightweight markup language on the internet. It is great for a subset of tasks, mainly blog posts and commenting. However, lately it has been adopted by the tec...
This is the story of a clever trick that's been around for at least 35 years, in which array values can be left uninitialized and then read during normal operations, yet the code behaves correctly no matter what garbage is sitting in the array. Like the best programming tricks, this one is the right tool for the job…
tl;dr: Rebuilding a target because its mtime is older than the mtimes of its dependencies, like `make` does, is very error prone. redo does...
Bitcoin is designed to support a wide variety of transaction types. Although currently the majority of transactions are standard payments to address it is possible to build more complex protocols.
Describing three strategies of implementing type classes, aiming to clarify their behavior
I myself was not on the famous C3 (Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation System) project in 1996-2000 that is pivotal to ‘Extreme Programming’ (XP). That project used Smalltalk, and team contribution was provided by Object Technology International’s ENVY version control system. I wanted to know more about that so I…
An extensively updated and expanded version of the best-selling first edition. Now covers recent and more advanced features of Haskell.
