Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 1,045 posts.
Matthias Felleisen jested "Why are you still using CL when Scrbl/Racket is so much better :-)" ? My response was as follows: Dear Matthias, you are right Racket is so much better in so many dimensions. I use Lisp because I just can't bear programming in a language without proper syntactic…
piccolo is an interpreter for the Lua language written in pure, mostly safe Rust with an eye towards safe sandboxing and resiliency. It uses gc-arena for its garbage collection system, and in fact gc-arena was originally created as part of piccolo .
As the man said, for every complex problem there’s a simple solution, and it’s wrong.
Link time optimization (LTO) is LLVM's way of implementing whole-program optimization. Cross-language LTO is a new feature in the Rust compiler that enables LLVM's link time optimization to be performed across a mixed C/C++/Rust codebase.
Several months ago, PHP officially announced the end-of-life forPHP5.
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
Julia 1.0 came out well over 2 years ago. Since then a lot has changed and a lot hasn’t. Julia 1.0 was a commitment to no breaking changes, but that is not to say no new features have been added to the language.
I wrote a self-hosting C compiler which I named 8cc in 40 days. This is a log when I was writing it from scratch by myself in 2012. The code and its history are available at GitHub .
Standard C undergoes regular improvements, now at C23. But there are baffling things that have not been fixed at all. The Dlang community embedded a C compiler in the D programming language compiler so it could compile C. This C compiler (aka ImportC ) was built from scratch. It provided the opportunity to use modern…
It’s That Blog Post. The release one, where we round up all the last of the features approved since the last time I blogged. If you’re
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…
It’s been nearly two and half years since I was an active contributor to the Rust project. There are some releases that I’ve been very excited about since then, and I’m heartened by Niko’s recent blog post emphasizing stability and polish over grand new projects. But I’ve also felt a certain apprehension at a lot of…
Random thoughts
I last wrote in December 2019 about my work on speeding up the Rust compiler. Time for another update.
Swift is heavily used in production for building cloud services at Apple, with incredible results. Last year, the Password Monitoring service was rewritten in Swift, handling multiple billions of requests per day from devices all over the world. In comparison with the previous Java service, the updated backend…
Over on GitHub, David Yu has an interesting performance benchmark for function calls of various Foreign Function Interfaces ( FFI ):
ps aux | more
Correctness in the face of cancellations: a written version of my talk at RustConf 2025.
It's a bit of a silly post, because syntax is the least interesting detail about the language, but, still, I can't stop thinking how Zig gets this detail just right for the class of curly-braced languages, and, well, now you'll have to think about that too.
Facebook is embracing Rust, one of the most loved and fastest-growing programming languages available today. In addition to bringing new talent to its Rust team, Facebook has announced that it is o…
I have recently become quite an enthusiast for the language Clojure . But why? Why would someone who has spent the last 30 years programmi...
Arthur’s thoughts on coding, software engineering, and other interesting things.
Writing and Stuff from Isaac Z. Schlueter
Although academic computer scientists have generally dismissed Objectivist-C, it has a zealous following among self-taught programmers and college sophomores.
