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Overhead of Returning Optional Values in Java and Rust (2021)
Some programming languages like Java or Scala offer more than one way to express a concept of “lack of value”. Traditionally, a special null value is used to...
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 3,470 posts.
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A surprising JavaScript memory leak found at Meteor
This week, my teammates at Meteor tracked down a surprising JavaScript memory leak . I searched the web for variations on javascript closure memory leak and came up with nothing relevant, so maybe this is a relatively unknown issue. (Most of what you find for that query talks about the bad garbage collection algorithm…
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C++ in Coders at Work
One of the topics I asked most of my Coders at Work interviewees about was C++. I am not an expert, or even a competent C++ programmer and recognize that my own opinions about C++ are not well-info…
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Deploying ES2015+ Code in Production Today
Most web developers I talk to these days love writing JavaScript with all the newest language features—async/await, classes, arrow functions, etc. However, despite the fact that all modern browsers can run ES2015+ code and natively support the features I just mentioned, most developers still transpile their code to…
3100
Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine (1989)
For Richard, a crazy idea was an opportunity to either prove it wrong or prove it right.
3101
A Technical Perspective on the Apple iPhone Case
The legal dispute between Apple and the FBI might prove pivotal in the long-running battle to protect users' privacy and right to use uncompromised encryption. The case has captured the public imagination. Of course, EFF supports Apple's efforts to protect its users. The case is complicated...
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The Prime That Wasn’t
Life, technology, and other good things
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Ruby 3.3's YJIT Runs Shopify's Production Code 15% Faster
Ruby 3.2 YJIT has optimized the production workloads of Shopify and other companies. We encourage you to enable YJIT in production. Once Ruby 3.3 is released, it should make your application even faster.
3106
Catching use-after-move C++ bugs with Clang's consumed annotations
This post describes a compile-time technique for catching use-after-move bugs in modern C++. It’s currently used to prevent some mistakes in the Serenity Operating System.
3107
To save C, we must save ABI
After that first Firebrand of an article on Application Binary Interface (ABI) Stability, I’m not sure anyone expected this to be the title of the next one, huh? It seems especially bad,
3108
Java is still available at zero-cost
The Java ecosystem has always been built on a high quality $free (zero-cost) JDK available from Oracle, and previously Sun. This is as true...
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LiveBeats: Building a social music app with Phoenix LiveView
Debut of LiveBeats social music app.
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WebAssembly Is Not A Stack Machine
This is the final part of a 4-part miniseries on issues with WebAssembly and proposals to fix them.
3112
Idiomatic Monads in Rust
A pragmatic new design for high-level abstractions Monads (and, more generally, constructs known as “higher kinded types”) are a tool for high-level abstraction in programming languages1. Historically, there has been a lot of debate inside (and outside) the Rust community about whether monads would be a useful…
3113
Backbone patterns
Here, I try to document the good practices that our team has learned along the way building Backbone applications. This document assumes that you already have some knowledge of Backbone.js , jQuery , and of course, JavaScript itself.
3114
How to build undo/redo in a multiplayer environment by Liveblocks
Notoriously tough to build, undo/redo in a multiplayer environment is even more fraught with difficulty. In this article, we will take you on a behind-the-scenes exclusive, explaining one of the most complex developer issues for multiplayer apps.
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Do low-level optimizations matter? Faster quicksort with cmov (2020)
Collectively, we have been thinking about sorting for longer than we have had computers. There is still an active literature 1 , 2 , 3 . We are taught that how the counts of comparisons and swaps vary with problem size is what matters: as problems get bigger, order dominates, and anything else is buried in the noise…
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Shenandoah GC in production: experience report
Update: I've made several edits to the post since Aleksey Shipilëv was kind enough to suggest many corrections and improvements.If you closely follow JVM development scene, you've probably noticed ...
3117
Replacing Python
In the first post, I took a brief look at the programming languages ATS, C#, Go, Haskell, OCaml, Python and Rust to try to decide which would be the …
3118
Such a Little Thing: The Semicolon in Rust
Look at a tiny syntax detail that shows up in current versions of rust that has profound implications on how the language deals with almost everything being an expression.
3119
Reviewing the cryptography used by Signal
Last year, I urged furries to stop using Telegram because it doesn’t actually provide them with any of the privacy guarantees they think it gives them. Instead of improving Telegram’s c…
3120
Problems with CSVs (2016)
Much of my professional work for the last 10+ years has revolved around handling, importing and exporting CSV files. CSV files are frustratingly misunderstood, abused, and most of all underspecified. While RFC4180 exists, it is far from definitive and goes largely ignored.