Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 80 posts.
posted by Matthew Flatt For background information about Racket on Chez Scheme (a.k.a. Racket CS), see the original announcement, the January 2018 report, the report at Scheme Workshop 2018, the January 2019 report, the ICFP experience report, an...
Python and R are slow when they can’t rely on functionality or libraries backed by C/C++. They are inefficient not only for certain algorithm development but also for common tasks such as FASTQ parsing. Using these languages limits the reach of biologists. Sometimes you may have a brilliant idea but can’t deliver a…
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.
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?
Checked exceptions have always been a controversial feature of the Java language.
Introducing RBS, Ruby’s new type signature language
Today we're proud to release TypeScript 4.1! If you're unfamiliar with TypeScript, it's a language that builds on JavaScript by adding syntax for type
This year Java hit an incredible milestone and reached the grand old age of 25 years. We celebrated its jubilee by running a special online Java day event, where lots of expert speakers shared their e
I last wrote in December 2019 about my work on speeding up the Rust compiler. Time for another update.
Snyk's annual JVM ecosystem report presents the results of the largest annual survey on the JVM ecosystem, which gathered over 2000 responses in the second half of 2019.
Andrey Petrov is the author of urllib3, the creator of Briefmetrics and ssh-chat, and a former Googler and YCombinator alum. He’s here to tell us of a...
An overview of a paper that presents a reference implementation of a defer mechanism (co-authored with Robert C. Seacord) has been accepted for publication at SAC’21. The full version is avai…
Shopify's involvement with TruffleRuby began half a year ago, with the goal of furthering the success of the project and Ruby community. TruffleRuby is an alternative implementation of the Ruby language (where the reference implementation is CRuby, or MRI) developed by Oracle Labs. TruffleRuby has high potential in…
Programming language performance is something that nearly everyone cares about at some point, whether they realise it or not. If you’re a programmer, you sometimes have to make your programs run fast; if you’re a user, you might be frustrated at a program that runs slowly, without knowing that it’s caused by a poor…
A blog about life between two parens.
A common perspective is that types are restrictions . Static types restrict the set of values a variable may contain, capturing some subset of the space of “all possible values.” Under this worldview, a typechecker is sort of like an oracle, predicting which values will end up where when the program runs and making…
