Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 2,232 posts.
It's unnecessary and complicated at almost every layer. At best I can congratulate someone for quickly and simply solving a problem on top of the shit that they are given. The only software that I like is one that I can easily understand and solves my problems. The amount of complexity I'm willing to tolerate is…
At this point in my career, I’ve worked on at least three projects where performance was a defining characteristic: Livegrep, Taktician, and Sorbet (I discussed sorbet in particular last time, and livegrep in an earlier post). I’ve also done a lot of other performance work on the tools I use, some of which ended up on…
A blog about Rust and embedded stuff
Asynchronous Rust is powerful but has a reputation for being hard to learn. There have been various ideas on how to fix the trickiest aspects, though with my focus being on Tokio 1.0, I had not been able to dedicate much focus to those topics. However, Niko’s async vision effort has recently started the discussion…
This is an encoder (based on gifsicle ) which implements lossy LZW compression. It can reduce animgif file sizes by 30%—50% at a cost of some dithering/noise.
How Bear is going to live a long and healthy life
This is the transcript of my RustConf 2023 talk: "Extending Rust's Effect System", presented on September 13th 2023 in Albuquerque, New Mexico and streamed online.
Hypothetically, how would you teach Computer Science or programming to someone who has no access to a computer, and with whom your only communication is books and postal mail?
A quick overview into wheel based Python deployments.
All kinds of reasonable-sounding beliefs about undefined behavior are wrong. Let's go through them.
Discussing a recent academic finding on Java and Scala, from industry's perspective.
Luke Page has a great post up with his list of YAGNI exceptions. YAGNI—You Ain’t Gonna Need It—is a rule that says you shouldn’t add a feature just because it …
Thanks to Nikhil Benesch, Justin Jaffray and several decades of "wouldn't it be nice if..." for contributions.
One smart thing Google does is rigorous code reviews. Every change, before you can land it, gets reviewed in at least two ways. First, someone on the team does a normal review to make sure the code does what it’s supposed to.
Web service designers have tried for some time now to correlate CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update and Delete) semantics with the Representational State Transfer (REST) verbs defined by the HTTP specif…
(I'm still looking for the catchiest way to appreciate the number MMXXVI. Exercise 7.2.1.6–122 gives 1234+.5*6+789 and -1+2345*6/7+8+9 and 1+(2/3)*45*67.8-9 ; other suggestions are welcome. The most elegant that I've seen so far is a beauty that was suggested independently by Arnaud Lefebvre and by Evangelos…
I thought about this one for a couple of years, then wrote it up, and left it untouched for another couple of years.
If you enjoy this article, I have published a book explaining the internals of Git through implementation: Building Git .
Almost a year ago now, Jack Diederich gave a talk entitled “Stop Writing Classes“, in which he implores Python programmers to stop creating classes just for the hell of it, and specifically calls out the common pattern of a class with only a constructor/initializer and a single method—which should, of course, just be…
Oftentimes when I am conversing about the design of Rust with other users - as on RFCs or the internals forum - I witness a peculiar remark about “explicitness.” It usually goes something like this: I do not like Feature Design X because it is too implicit. Magic is okay in Other Language Y, but Rust is supposed to be…
After working through “the book” on the Rust programming language and getting started with the first non-trivial, real-world application I found myself faced with a question I didn’t yet feel well-equipped to handle: “How should you structure error handling in a mature rust application?”
A draft design document describing lightweight userland cooperative threads for SBCL.
Editor’s note: For this blog entry I welcome my friend and colleague Gerben Stavengaas a guest author.
We present a prototype of a programming system called Shadama. Shadama is designed for writing programs that create, control and visualize large numbers of objects. The basic execution model follows the tradition of StarLogo and its "turtles and patches" abstraction. Turtles, Termites, and Traffic Jams: Explorations…
Type inference is a major feature of several programming languages, most notably languages from the ML family like Haskell. In this post I want to provide a brief overview of type inference, along with a simple Python implementation for a toy ML-like language.
