1681
Why I Write Games in C (yes, C)
I am an unusual beast. All my solo project games I've been making recently have been written in 'vanilla' C. Nobody does this. So I think it might be interesting to explain why I do.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 2,232 posts.
1682
Go is still not good
Previous posts Why Go is not my favourite language and Go programs are not portable have me critiquing Go for over a decade.
1683
Go: What we got right, what we got wrong
This is my closing talk ( video ) from the GopherConAU conference in Sydney, given November 10, 2023, the 14th anniversary of Go being lau...
1684
How Stylo Brought Rust and Servo to Firefox
Two weeks ago, we released Firefox Quantum to the world. It’s been a big moment for Mozilla, shaping up to be a blockbuster release that’s changing how peopl...
1685
Donald Knuth on work habits, problem solving, and happiness (2020)
Recently, I came across a few old and new interviews of Donald Knuth (sources: (i) Companion to the Papers of Donald Knuth , (ii) Interviews conducted by Lex Fridman Part 1 and Part 2 ), where he sheds light on his work habits, how he approaches problems, and his philosophy towards happiness. I really enjoyed reading…
1686
Finding and fixing Ghostty's largest memory leak
A few months ago, users started reporting that Ghostty was consuming absurd amounts of memory, with one user reporting 37 GB after 10 days of uptime. Today, I'm happy to say the fix has been found and merged . This post is an overview of what caused the leak, a look at some of Ghostty's internals, and some brief…
1687
It takes a PhD to develop that
In light of recent events regarding the performance of the Windows terminal 1 , I thought it would be worth spending some time on this topic, since it uncovers a few problems that are pestering the software industry.
1688
iMessage, explained
This blog post is going to be a cursory overview of the internals iMessage, as I’ve discovered during my work on pypush, an open source project that reimplements iMessage.
1689
How some good corporate engineering blogs are written
I've been comparing notes with people who run corporate engineering blogs and one thing that I think is curious is that it's pretty common for my personal blog to get more traffic than the entire corp eng blog for a company with a nine to ten figure valuation and it's not uncommon for my blog to get an order of…
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1691
Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app (2021)
Lessons learned from 15 years of writing SumatraPDF, a great open-source PDF, eBook, and comic book reader for Windows
1692
The Greatest Regex Trick Ever (2014)
Describes a regular expressions technique to match a word or pattern except in certain contexts: excluding tags, ignoring contents, word blacklist.
1693
Making video games (without an engine) in 2025
Thoughts, tools, and libraries I use to make games
1694
It Takes 6 Days to Change 1 Line of Code (2015)
(A true story.) Philip (President): Our factory is underutilized by 10%. Either we start building more of our backlog or we lay people off. I'd rather keep everyone busy, build inventory, and get...
1695
A three-page paper that shook philosophy, with lessons for software engineers
In 1963, the philosopher Edmund Gettier published a three-page paper in the journal Analysis that quickly became a classic in the field. Epistemologists going back to the Greeks had debated what it meant to know something, and in the Enlightenment, a definition was settled upon: to know something is to have a…
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1697
Agentic Engineering Patterns
Patterns for getting the best results out of coding agents like Claude Code and OpenAI Codex. See my introduction for more on this project.
1698
Things Every Hacker Once Knew
One fine day in January 2017 I was reminded of something I had half-noticed a few times over the previous decade. That is, younger hackers don’t know the bit structure of ASCII and the meaning of the odder control characters in it.
1699
Writing Python like it's Rust
You can check out a YouTube recording of a talk based on this blog post.
1700
Kotlin Is Better
I've also ended up using Emacs along side Jetbrains IDEs (PyCharm & Webstorm). It is an odd combo but it works great. Emacs for mind-control level text editing, and the IDE works great for mouse-oriented poking around and small edits.
1701
ClojureScript 1.7: ClojureScript can compile itself
I’ve been enamoured with languages in the Lisp family ever since I first encountered The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs now more than a decade ago. At the time I was disappointed that such beautiful systems found so little use in day to day programming. Lisp seemed both deeply pragmatic (Objects!)…
1702
Horrible edge cases when dealing with music
Personal blog of Julien (jvoisin) Voisin
1703
The Little Printf
This text is a transcript of a presentation I have given on October 9, 2015, at the CityCode conference in Chicago. This content is also available in video , and as a PDF Document better suited for printing.
1704
Bugs in Hello World
A blog by sunfishcode
1705
Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution
I tend to use a lot of retro software, partly because I’m a big nerd but also because I just prefer to work in a terminal. There were a ton of major commercial software products for MS-DOS that were highly polished, and can still be used effectively in an xterm today.
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1707
Build tools around workflows, not workflows around tools
While I was there, I thought a lot about tools – mechanical tools, software tools, tools that last, and tools that are fragile. The somber snow-covered scenery made me think about how quickly most of the tools we use today get outdated or replaced, and I thought about the kinds of tools that I’ve been building for…
1708
The ChatGPT/Codex app bundles a full copy of LibreOffice
I was poking around in my ~/.cache/ folder using OmniDiskSweeper when I spotted something interesting. The OpenAI Codex desktop app (since rebranded to just ChatGPT) has 1.7GB of stuff in …
1709
I don't like NumPy
it’s too hard
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