Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 1,045 posts.
So the C programming language has been getting a lot of bad press recently; a really stupid bug in some C code has compromised some of the core security infrastructure on the internet. The fix is easy, but the knock-on effects are going to go on for years and will cost serious amounts of money. As a result, people…
Swift 5 switches the preferred encoding of strings from UTF-16 to UTF-8 while preserving efficient Objective-C-interoperability. Because the String type abstracts away these low-level concerns, no source-code changes from developers should be necessary*, but it’s worth highlighting some of the benefits this move gives…
This is the first article in a series dedicated to multiple dispatch - an advanced abstraction technique available to programmers out-of-the-box in some languages, and implementable in others. This first post in the series presents the technique and explains the problem it intends to solve. It uses C++ as the…
Currently the main goal of the Crystal core team is to reach 1.0 in the near future. Since achieving that goal involves a number of non-obvious tradeoffs, we want to use this post to shed some light on those inherent tensions and how they drive our work and priorities for the next few releases.
Sometimes I see unsourced, unclear, vaguely mystical claims about K being the fastest array language. It happens often enough that I'd like to write a long-form rebuttal to these, and a demand that the people who make these do more to justify them.
In your build tools, you may have noticed that you have an ECMAScript 3 target, and 5 and up, but never a 4. Why is that?
For a while now, the Ruby community has become enamored in the latest new hotness, evented programming and Node.js. It's gone so far that I've heard a number of prominent Rubyists saying that JavaScript and Node.js are the only sane way to handle a number of
Looking for operator or function names? Well have a look at the following and remember using existing one may ease the transition :)
Checked exceptions have always been a controversial feature of the Java language.
Overture to our small Lisp to x86-64 compiler
Posted by Aymeric Augustin on Aug. 19, 2012
Zig is a general-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust , optimal , and reusable software.
Topics : monads, Common Lisp, functional programming Author : Marijn Haverbeke Date : July 11th 2008
The Haskell Phrasebook is a free quick-start Haskell guide comprised of a sequence of small annotated programs.
Many people who use Rust for a bit - especially those who like the language but do not fall in love with it - feel a sense that there must be a smaller, simpler variation on the same theme which would maybe be a little less powerful, but would also be much easier to use. I agree with them, but I think they are almost…
This post is now a part of the official rust book In my previous post I talked a bit about why the RWlock pattern is important for accessing data, …
Back in 1996, having heard horror stories about Herbert Schildt's C: The Complete Reference , I decided to check it out. I flipped the book open; I found glaring errors. I paged through it. I found more glaring errors. In short, the book had lived up to the hype; it was awful. Being a pedantic sort, and having just…
Today marks the end of a crazy six year journey for me at Microsoft. I clearly remember my brutal first 8 months at this company as I worked with lawyers, marketing folks and execs to figure out if and how we could release IronPython as an open source project from Microsoft. The final approval for that release came…
A question is infrequently answered either because few people know the answer or because it concerns an obscure, subtle point (but a point that may be crucial to you). I thought I had invented the term for my Java IAQ , but it also shows up at the very informative About.com Urban Legends site. There are lots of Python…
Recently I had to go through some code that uses the uIP TCP/IP stack, which reminded me, it has been a long time since I did something in C so I ended up spending the weekend implementing the 10 rules John McCarthy described in his paper A Micro-Manual for Lisp - not the whole Truth .
A favorite conundrum of many Lisp aficionados is why the language appears to languish in disuse. Talk of cultural problems , "the library question" (which usually boils down to nonsensical circular reasoning), too many parentheses, and other absurdities simply dances around the blindingly obvious explanation - one…
Reviewing the JIT in Python 3.13
How Go 2 proposals will be evaluated, selected, and shipped.
In April 2026, Canonical disclosed 44 CVEs in uutils, the Rust reimplementation of GNU coreutils that ships by default since 25.10. Most of them came out of an external audit commissioned ahead of the 26.04 LTS. I read through the list and thought th…
Previous posts Why Go is not my favourite language and Go programs are not portable have me critiquing Go for over a decade.
This is my closing talk ( video ) from the GopherConAU conference in Sydney, given November 10, 2023, the 14th anniversary of Go being lau...
Visit the post for more.
You can check out a YouTube recording of a talk based on this blog post.
