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Python 3.12
The official home of the Python Programming Language
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 217 posts.
122
Learn x86-64 assembly by writing a GUI from scratch
Most people think assembly is only to be used to write toy programs for learning purposes, or to write a highly optimized version of a specific function inside a codebase written in a high-level language.
123
Anything can be a message queue if you use it wrongly enough
Xe Iaso's personal website.
124
Accidental database programming
Join me as we take a look at common application data patterns, and how they relate to the inner-workings of databases. In this post, we discuss data caching, indexing, optimistic mutations, and recursive cache invalidation. We will see how life might be easier if we could just use a frontend optimized database like…
125
Sourcehut will blacklist the Go module mirror
sourcehut is a network of useful open source tools for software project maintainers and collaborators, including git repos, bug tracking, continuous integration, and mailing lists.
126
Ruby 3.2’s YJIT is Production-Ready
YJIT, a just-in-time (JIT) implementation on top of CRuby built at Shopify, is now production-ready and delivering major improvements to performance and speed. Maxime shares the updates that have been made in this newest version of YJIT, and future plans for further optimization.
127
SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes
SectorC ( github ) is a C compiler written in x86-16 assembly that fits within the 512 byte boot sector of an x86 machine. It supports a subset of C that is large enough to write real and interesting programs. It is quite likely the smallest C compiler ever written.
128
HTML Web Components
I think the word “component” in “web components” confused a lot of people — at least it did me. “Web components” sounded like the web platform’s equivalent to…
129
Commander Keen's adaptive tile refresh
I have been reading Doom Guy by John Romero. It is an excellent book which I highly recommend. In the ninth chapter, John describes being hit by lightning upon seeing Adaptive Tile Refresh (ATR). That made me realize I never took the time to understand how this crucial piece of tech powers the Commander Keen (CK)…
130
Rethinking serverless with FLAME
Imagine if you could auto scale simply by wrapping any existing app code in a function and have that block of code run in a temporary copy of your app
131
Effective Rust (2021)
A collection of specific ways to improve your use of Rust
132
Making Python faster with Rust
Update: I gave a talk on this topic at P99 CONF 2023 and at PyCon IL 2024 (Hebrew). A while ago at $work, we had a performance issue with one of our core Python …
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Fine-Tuning Llama-2: A Comprehensive Case Study for Tailoring Custom Models
We examine the Llama-2 models under 3 real-world use cases and show that fine-tuning yields significant accuracy improvements.
135
Why use Pascal?
Object Pascal is a modern, readable, fast, type-safe, cross-platform OOP programming language. It is also easy to pick up.
136
Flattening ASTs and other compiler data structures
This is an introduction to data structure flattening, a special case of arena allocation that is a good fit for programming language implementations. We build a simple interpreter twice, the normal way and the flat way, and show that some fairly mechanical code changes can give you a 2.4× speedup.
137
Structured logging with slog
The Go 1.21 standard library includes a new structured logging package, log/slog.
138
The part of Postgres we hate the most: Multi-version concurrency control
Andy Pavlo - Carnegie Mellon University,
139
Rust fact vs. fiction: 5 Insights from Google's Rust journey in 2022
Wondering about Rust? We're addressing rumors and providing insight gained from years of early adoption of Rust here at Google.
140
Designing a programming language to speedrun Advent of Code
“shouldn’t this have been published a few months ago?” yeah, probably. I even considered submitting it to the AoC contest. time is a real beast. The title is clickbait. I did not design and implement a programming language for the sole or even primary purpose of leaderboarding on Advent of Code. It just turned out…
141
iOS 17 makes iPhone more personal and intuitive
Apple today announced iOS 17, a major release that upgrades the communications experience across Phone, FaceTime, and Messages.
142
Setenv Is Not Thread Safe and C Doesn't Want to Fix It
You can't safely use the C setenv() or unsetenv() functions in a program that uses threads. Those functions modify global state, and can cause other threads calling getenv() to crash. This also causes crashes in other languages that use those C standard library functions, such as Go's os.Setenv ( Go issue ) and Rust's…
143
Emacs standing alone on a Linux Kernel
Nano How-To explaining how to setup a root file system with only emacs.
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JEP 450: Compact Object Headers
Reduce the size of object headers in the HotSpot JVM from between 96 and 128 bits down to 64 bits on 64-bit architectures. This will reduce heap size, improve deployment density, and increase data locality.
145
From Stacks to Trees: A new aliasing model for Rust
Since last fall, Neven has been doing an internship to develop a new aliasing model for Rust: Tree Borrows. Hang on a second, I hear you say – doesn’t Rust already have an aliasing model? I...
146
Hotspot performance engineering fails
Developers often believe that software performance follows a Pareto distribution: 80% of the running time is spent in 20% of the code. Using this model, you can write most of your code without any care for performance and focus on the narrow pieces of code that are performance sensitive. Engineers like Casey Muratori…
147
I wrote a string type
I write compilers for fun. I can’t help it. Consequently, I also write a lot of parsers. In systems programming, it’s usually a good idea to try to share memory rather than reuse it, so as such my AST types tend to look like this.
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My review of the C standard library in practice
In general, when working in C I avoid the standard library, libc, as much as possible. If possible I won’t even link it. For people not used to working and thinking this way, the typical response is confusion. Isn’t that like re-inventing the wheel? For me, libc is a wheel barely worth using — too many deficiencies in…
149
GPT-3 will ignore tools when it disagrees with them
Augmenting GPT-3 with tools is a popular technique right now. But is GPT-3 really using them?
150
My experience crafting an interpreter with Rust (2021)
Last year I finally decided to learn some Rust. The official book by Steve Klabnik and Carol Nichols is excellent, but even after reading it and working on some small code exercises, I felt that I needed more to really understand the language. I wanted to work on a small project to get some hands-on experience, but…