Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 61 posts.
Some time later, I came across Iavor’s "jokes" page, including a funny bit called “ The Evolution of a Programmer ” in which the traditional imperative "Hello, world" program is developed through several variations, from simple beginnings to a ridiculously complex extreme. A moment’s thought turned up the factorial…
QBE is a compiler backend that aims to provide 70% of the performance of industrial optimizing compilers in 10% of the code. QBE fosters language innovation by offering a compact user-friendly and performant backend. The size limit constrains QBE to focus on the essential and prevents embarking on a never-ending path…
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use cgo.” Now they have two problems.
A common problem I see in object-oriented design is: A wizard is a kind of player. A warrior is a kind of player. A staff is a kind of weapon. A sword is a kind of weapon. A player has a weapon. Bu…
This is a loose transcript (or long paraphrasing?) of a presentation given at ConnectDev'16, a conference organized by Genetec in which I was invited to speak.
Integer overflow detection/handling in Rust is sometimes misunderstood.
This is a draft I wrote in early 2015 and never got around to publishing. Here’s the mostly unpolished version because it wasn’t doing anybody any good sitting in my drafts folder. The simplest change was updating year 2015 to 2016 at publication time.
“If you don’t know how compilers work, then you don’t know how computers work. If you’re not 100% sure whether you know how compilers work, then you don’t know how they work.” — Steve Yegge There you have it. Think about it. It doesn’t really matter …
Random code snippets, projects and musings about software from Eric Kidd, a developer and occasional entrepreneur.
The Scala language is large and complex, and it provides a variety of tools that a developer can use to do the same thing in a variety of ways. Given the range of possible solutions to every problem, how can a developer choose which one should be used? This is the first in a series of blog posts aiming to provide…
(To follow my compiler related posts, either subscribe to my main RSS feed, or the compiler specific one )
This paper appears in Lisp and Symbolic Computation , Volume 1, No. 1, June 1988, pp81-101.
Recently we (Felix, Niko, and I) have been working on getting compiler-level GC support for Rust. The plan is to provide a base set of APIs and …
A few weeks ago, on a whim my friend and I decided to hackathon our way through an app to help us learn how to play guitar . In a stroke of inspiration, we decided to learn something new, and do the project in the Elm programming language , about which I had heard many good things.
There are about six major conceptualizations of memory, which I’m calling “memory models”, that dominate today’s programming.
I've recently been exploring the exciting new world of asynchronous I/O libraries in Python 3 – specifically asyncio and curio . These two libraries make some different design choices. This is an essay that I wrote to try to explain to myself what those differences are and why I think they matter, and distill some…
Students often ask for a recommendation on what language they should learn next. If you're looking for a job in industry, my reply is to learn whatever is hot right now: C++, Java and C#--and probably Python, Ruby, PHP and Perl too.
This document serves as a collection of reasons why beginners should avoid Python 3 as of November 22nd, 2016. I give two sets of reasons as I see them now. One for total beginners, and another for people who are more knowledgeable about programming. The first section attempts to explain the case against starting with…
One thing that works well in practice in cases where you really don’t want to process single bytes at a time is to use a union for going from one type to another. Granted, writing one member of a union and reading from a different one also isn’t allowed per the standard, but every compiler I’ve come across allows it…
The Christian doctrine of trinitarianism states that there is one God that is manifest in three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, who together form the Holy Trinity. The doctrine…
In my last blog entry LLand LR Parsing Demystified, we explored LL and LR parsers from ablack-box perspective. We arrived at a model for these parsers whereb...
Zed Shaw, of Learn Python the Hard Way fame, has now written The Case Against Python 3. I’m not involved with core Python development. The only skin I have in this game is that I like Python 3. It’s a good language. And one of the big factors I’ve seen slowing its adoption is that respected people in the Python commu
My first adventures in parsing theory came when I was doing anindependent study of programming languages in college. When I got tothe part about algorithms s...
Signed integers are not allowed to overflow in C and C++, and this helps compilers generate better code. I was interested in how GCC is tak...
I was hoping you would mention the dynamic checkers, ASAN etc. My fear is people will start using these but not understand how to really use them properly. Since they’re dynamic checkers you really need a good testing harness and test cases to go with it. The bugs ASAN/TSAN etc catch are usually strange boundary…
Many functional programming articles teach abstract functional techniques. That is, composition, pipelining, higher order functions. This one is different. I...
Ok, I lied, there’s no weird trick. However, you can easily reduce a Go binary size by more than 6 times with some flags and common tools.
There are still some rough edges here, and also a fair amount of content to be added. But if we waited until everything was polished before publishing, it would probably never happen. So feel free to make comments, suggestions, or contribute new content. As always, pull requests are the most desirable.
