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How safe is Zig?
I keep seeing discussions that equate zig's level of memory safety with c (or occasionally with rust!). Neither is particularly accurate. This is an attempt at a more detailed breakdown.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 2,232 posts.
212
The Cathedral and the Bazaar (1999)
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the Open Publication License, version 2.0.
213
Proposal for a Friendly Dialect of C
What implications exist around linking friendly-c code with machiavellian-c? I.e. put the performance critical kernels in there own module and work realy hard to make it correct.
214
Unicode in Python 3
A list of things about unicode on Linux and Python 3 you really did not want to know.
215
Go and Versioning: Minimal Version Selection
A versioned Go command must decide which module versions to use in each build. I call this list of modules and versions for use in a given build the build list . For stable development, today’s build list must also be tomorrow’s build list. But then developers must also be allowed to change the build list: to upgrade…
216
Feature Toggles
Feature Flags can be categorized into several buckets; manage each appropriately. Smart implementation can help constrain complexity.
217
Separating Programming Sheep from Non-Programming Goats
⚠ Please note, this paper was ultimately retracted by its author (pdf) in 2014: In 2006 I wrote an intemperate description of the results of an experiment carried out by Saeed Dehnadi. Many of the extravagant claims I made were insupportable, and I retract them. I continue to believe, however, that
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Designing with types: Making illegal states unrepresentable
Encoding business logic in types
219
The Future of JavaScript MVCs
often devs still approach performance of JS code as if they are riding a horse cart but the horse had long been replaced with fusion reactor
220
Media for Thinking the Unthinkable
For more information on the context behind this talk, see An Ill-Advised Personal Note about "Media for Thinking the Unthinkable" .
221
Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
222
The Lost Art of C Structure Packing
This page is about a technique for reducing the memory footprint of programs in compiled languages with C-like structures - manually repacking these declarations for reduced size. To read it, you will require basic knowledge of the C programming language.
223
Handles are the better pointers (2018)
28-Nov-2018: I’ve added a small update at the end on how to prevent‘handle collisions’ with a per-slot generation counter
224
Programmer Competency Matrix (2016)
A matrix for rating programmers on computer science, software engineering, programming, security, infrastructure, data, AI-assisted development, experience and knowledge, from 2ⁿ to log(n).
225
Dark Matter Developers: The Unseen 99% (2012)
In astronomy and cosmology, dark matter is a currently-undetermined type of ...
226
Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big (1991)
Lisp has done quite well over the last ten years: becoming nearly standardized, forming the basis of a commercial sector, achieving excellent performance, having good environments, able to deliver applications. Yet the Lisp community has failed to do as well as it could have. In this paper I look at the successes, the…
227
Zip Files All the Way Down (2010)
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room…
228
Semantic Compression
An introduction to the idea that code should be approached with a mindset towards compressing it semantically, rather than orienting it around objects.
229
Taco Bell Programming
The more I write code and design systems, the more I understand that many times, you can achieve the desired functionality simply with clever reconfigurations of the basic Unix tool set. After all, functionality is an asset, but code is a liability . This is the opposite of a trend of nonsense called DevOps, where…
230
The CRAPL: An academic-strength open source license
Generally, academic software is stapled together on a tight deadline; an expert user has to coerce it into running; and it's not pretty code. Academic code is about "proof of concept." These rough edges make academics reluctant to release their software. But, that doesn't mean they shouldn't.
231
The Meaning of ‘Hack’
“ The word hack doesn't really have 69 different meanings”, according to MIT hacker Phil Agre. “ In fact, hack has only one meaning, an extremely subtle and profound one which defies articulation. Which connotation is implied by a given use of the word depends in similarly profound ways on the context. Similar remarks…
232
An oral history of Bank Python
The strange world of Python, as used by big investment banks
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Text Rendering Hates You
Rendering text, how hard could it be? As it turns out, incredibly hard! To my knowledge, literally no system renders text “perfectly”. It’s all best-effort, although some efforts are more important than others.
235
What every computer science major should know (2011)
Given the expansive growth in the field, it's become challenging to discern what belongs in a modern computer science degree.
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8088 MPH: We Break All Your Emulators
One of my bucket list items since I read my first party report back in 1991 was to attend a european demoparty and compete in a compo. I competed at NAID ’96 and placed there, which was awes…
238
Doom 3 Source code review
On November 23, 2011 id Software maintained the tradition and released the source code of their previous engine. This time is was the turn of idTech4 which powered Prey, Quake 4 and of course Doom 3. Within hours the GitHub repository was forked more than 400 times and people started to look at the game internal…
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JavaScript Isn't Scheme
It seems like I can’t spend five minutes on reddit these days without someone playing the JS-is-Scheme is card . I see everything from the innocuous, “JavaScript has a lot in common with Scheme”, all the way up to, “JavaScript is basically Scheme.” This is basically crazy. Or, at least it has a lot in common with…