Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 1,045 posts.
Crystal has made a huge step forward to have parallelism as a first class citizen. In short, you can set up the number of worker threads on runtime and each new fiber will be scheduled to run on one of them. Channel and select will work seamlessly. You are allowed to share memory between workers, but you will probably…
A discussion of how Sorbet's type syntax came to be, the problems it solves, and how it could improve.
This post takes a short break from ASDL to expand on one of my Hacker News comments.
A computer scientist working in open source towards a more hopeful future.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been devoting my free time to fleshing out the theory behind non-lexical lifetimes (NLL). I think I’ve arrived at a pretty good point and I plan to write various posts talking about it. Before getting into the details, though, I wanted to start out with a post that lays out roughly how…
It is thankfully common wisdom nowadays that documentation must be placed as near as possible to the code it documents, and should be fine-grained to a minimal unit of describability (the thing being documented). The practice provides numerous benefits to the codebase and project as a whole:
For a while I’ve been working on a garbage collector for Rust with Nika Layzell. I thought this would be a good time to talk of our design and …
After the last post about high performance, high level programming, Slava Pestov, of Factor fame, wondered whether it was generally true that “if you want good performance you have to write C…
With Perl 5.36.0 just around the corner, we thought that this is a good time to clarify plans for the future of the Perl programming language. We realised that the future was hammered out in a number of steps, across several months. This meant that there hasn't been a single statement we could refer people to. This…
Web browsers do a lot of calculations on geometric coordinates, in many different coordinate systems and units of measurement. For example, a browser may need to translate a position expressed ...
Describing three strategies of implementing type classes, aiming to clarify their behavior
I myself was not on the famous C3 (Chrysler Comprehensive Compensation System) project in 1996-2000 that is pivotal to ‘Extreme Programming’ (XP). That project used Smalltalk, and team contribution was provided by Object Technology International’s ENVY version control system. I wanted to know more about that so I…
An extensively updated and expanded version of the best-selling first edition. Now covers recent and more advanced features of Haskell.
One-liners are like Haiku poetry. Not always practical, not always readable, they are fun to write. As with any art, some are better than others, but from time-to-time, a true gem pops up.
An article describing the experience of writing a Lisp interpreter in Haskell.
Lisp has been supporting the world's most complex applications since 1958. And Lisp has grown a lot since then. So if you or someone you know harbors fears or concerns about Lisp because of something learned in a class or muttered by a friend 20 or 30 years ago, it's time to take a fresh look. In this paper we're…
You may have heard last week how Innokenty Mihailov’s great Enumerable::Lazy feature was accepted into the Ruby 2.0 code base. But you may not have heard about an even more significant change that was merged into Ruby 2.0 in January: a new algorithm for garbage collection called “Bitmap Marking.” The developer behind…
Zig places importance on the concept of whether an expression is known at compile-time. There are a few different places this concept is used, and these building blocks are used to keep the language small, readable, and powerful.
"Type-driven development"
According to the LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual ISBN 0 262 13011 4, `A' and `D' stand for `address' and `decrement', as on page 36 it says:
Metaprogramming is the writing of computer programs with the ability to treat programs as their data. It means that a program could be designed to read, generate, analyse and/or transform other programs, and even modify itself while running.
Historically, LLVM's major releases always added "0.1" to the version number, producing major versions like 3.8, 3.9, and 4.0 (expected by March 2017). With our next release though, we're changing this.
This article is an attempt to better understand how the front-end of Python works. Just reading documentation and source code may be a bit boring, so I'm taking a hands-on approach here: I'm going to add an until statement to Python.
There are a thousand programming languages out there (Literally, it seems, according to people who actually count such things.) A classification of so many species is bound to be complex and subjec…
