Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 49 posts.
Historically, I’ve struggled to find a concise, simple way to explain what it means to practice type-driven design. Too often, when someone asks me “How did you come up with this approach?” I find I can’t give them a satisfying answer. I know it didn’t just come to me in a vision—I have an iterative design process…
Inspirations & experiments, mainly about denotative/functional programming in Haskell
They’re not burritos.
I'm developing a programming language called Kernel. Kernel is a conservative, Scheme-like dialect of Lisp in which everything is a first-class object.
The typestate pattern is an API design pattern that encodes information about an object’s run-time state in its compile-time type . In particular, an API using the typestate pattern will have:
Many programmers are aware that C++ templates are Turing-complete, andthis was proved in the 2003 paper C++ Templates areTuring Complete.
LRtDW is a series of articles putting Rust features in context for low-level C programmers who maybe don’t have a formal CS background — the sort of people who work on firmware, game engines, OS kernels, and the like. Basically, people like me.
For those who don’t follow Swift’s development, ABI stability has been one of its most ambitious projects and possibly it’s defining feature, and it finally shipped in Swift 5 . The result is something I find endlessly fascinating, because I think Swift has pushed the notion of ABI stability farther than any language…
In which I discuss a modules problem that is being ignored
قلب is a programming language exploring the role of human culture in coding. Code is written entirely in Arabic, highlighting cultural biases of computer science and challenging the assumptions we make about programming. It is implemented as a tree-walking language interpreter in JavaScript.
I’ve programmed systems in many different languages; from assembler to Java. I’ve written programs in binary machine language. I’ve written applications in Fortran, COBOL, PL/1, C, Pascal, C++, Java, Lua, Smalltalk, Logo, and dozens of other languages. I’ve used statically typed languages, with lots of type inference…
Video and transcript of Jimmy Koppel's Compose 2019 talk on defunctionalization, the best refactoring you've never heard of.
Let's take a quick look at what compile-time execution looks like in Zig.
How do you design good abstractions? By using abstractions that already exist.
Beautiful Racket
I was asked by someone to put this old piece of writing of mine somewhere more permanent, so here it is. A few comments off the top: This isn’t new. I wrote it years ago. Yes, I’m a b…
The goal of Project Valhalla is to bring more flexible flattened data types to JVM-based languages, to bring the programming model back in line with the performance characteristics of modern hardware. The core feature is inline classes (known previously as value types ), but such a fundamental perturbation of the JVM…
Beautiful Racket
We say Lox is a “high-level” language because it frees programmers from worrying about details irrelevant to the problem they’re solving. The user becomes an executive, giving the machine abstract goals and letting the lowly computer figure out how to get there.
WG21 has a strict schedule (see P1000) by which we ship the standard every three years. We don’t delay it. Around this time of each cycle, we regularly get questions about “but why so strict?”, esp…
A look at what the newest generation of Java GCs can do
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
Rust's error handling is a pleasure to use thanks to the Result type . It ensures Rust's error handling is always correct , visible , and performant . And with the addition of the ? operator in Rust 1.13 , and the addition of return types from main in Rust 1.26 Rust's error handling has only kept improving.
A long time ago, the Rust language was a language with typestate. Officially, typestates were dropped long before Rust 1.0. In this entry, I’ll get you in on the worst kept secret of the Rust community: Rust still has typestates.
