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Speculation in JavaScriptCore
This post is all about speculative compilation, or just speculation for short, in the context of the JavaScriptCore virtual machine.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 267 posts.
152
Bring your monorepo down to size with sparse-checkout
Git 2.25.0 includes a new experimental git sparse-checkout command that makes the existing feature easier to use, along with some important performance benefits for large repositories.
153
REBOL Oneliners
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.
154
Introduction to AOLserver, Part 1 (1999)
(Written in July 1999 for www.linuxworld.com ; permanently installed now in Web Tools Review )
155
On Apple's Piss-Poor Documentation
On this week's Under the Radar, Marco and Dave eloquenty discussed Apple's piss-poor documentation.
156
Write Libraries, Not Frameworks
Normally when I write about something on here I take the time to fully think-out a point, make a case, address all the major sides of the issue that I can think of, etc.
157
Ruby 3.0
We are pleased to announce the release of Ruby 3.0.0. From 2015 we developed hard toward Ruby 3, whose goal is performance, concurrency, and Typing. Especial...
158
Building a BitTorrent client from the ground up in Go
What is the complete path between visiting thepiratebay and sublimating an mp3 file from thin air? In this post, we'll implement enough of the BitTorrent protocol to download Debian. Look at the [Source code](https://github.com/veggiedefender/torrent-client/) or skip to the [last…
159
The Next Step for Generics
An updated generics design draft, and a translation tool for experimentation
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Writing Safe Shell Scripts (2019)
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Translating Quake 3 into Rust
The Rust-loving team at Immunant has been hard at work on C2Rust, a migration framework that takes the drudgery out of migrating to Rust. Our goal is to make safety improvements to the translated Rust automatically where we can, and help the programmer do the same where we cannot. First, however, we have to build a…
164
The best Parts of Visual Studio Code are proprietary
I've been very surprised and delighted over a number of years now by Microsoft's strong efforts in open source. I understand the skeptics, I was on Slashdot when they tried to sue Linux out of existence and I think only time will tell. I figure MS contributing is better than them hunting Linux distributions for sport…
165
Writing a SQL database from scratch in Go
Writing a SQL database from scratch in Go: 1. SELECT, INSERT, CREATE and a REPL
166
Migrating Dropbox from Nginx to Envoy
In this blogpost we’ll talk about the old Nginx-based traffic infrastructure, its pain points, and the benefits we gained by migrating to Envoy . We’ll compare Nginx to Envoy across many software engineering and operational dimensions. We’ll also briefly touch on the migration process, its current state, and some of…
167
Mercurial’s journey to and reflections on Python 3
Mercurial 5.2 was released on November 5, 2019. It is the first version of Mercurial that supports Python 3. This milestone comes nearly 11 years after Python 3.0 was first released on December 3, 2008.
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To the brain, reading computer code is not the same as reading language
MIT neuroscientists have found reading computer code does not rely on the regions of the brain involved in language processing. Instead, it activates the “multiple demand network,” which is also recruited for complex cognitive tasks such as solving math problems or crossword puzzles.
170
Hypermodern Python
A guide to modern Python tooling with a focus on simplicity and minimalism.
171
Complexity Has to Live Somewhere
We try to get rid of the complexity, control it, and seek simplicity. I think framing things that way is misguided. Complexity has to live somewhere. Embrace it
172
Don’t try to sanitize input – escape output
Why you should escape output correctly, but generally not sanitize user input.
173
Image GPT
We find that, just as a large transformer model trained on language can generate coherent text, the same exact model trained on pixel sequences can generate coherent image completions and samples. By establishing a correlation between sample quality and image classification accuracy, we show that our best generative…
174
Cloudflare Workers now supports COBOL
COBOL is often a source of amusement for programmers because it is seen as old, verbose, clunky, and difficult to maintain. COBOL can now be used to write code for Cloudflare’s serverless platform Workers.
175
SQLite 3.33
A complete list of SQLite releases in a single page and a chronology are both also available. A detailed history of every check-in is available at SQLite version control site .
176
It Is Never a Compiler Bug Until It Is
Last week I was trying to add some testing code to libsecp256k1 and I was pulling out my hair trying to get it to work. No amount of printf was working to illuminate what I was doing wrong. Finally, out of desperation, I thought I would do a quick check to see if there are any compiler bugs related to memcmp , and lo…
177
How Shopify Uses WebAssembly Outside of the Browser
At Shopify, we’re keeping the flexibility of untrusted Partner code, but executing it on our own infrastructure with WebAssembly.
178
Four features that justify a new Unix shell
On a lobste.rs thread about the rationale for the Fennel language, I posted this summary of why Oil exists:
179
Towards Principled Reactive UI
Update 7 May 2022: A followup to this post containing significant conceptual advance is Xilem: an architecture for UI in Rust. I consider the Crochet experiment to be mostly negative, as there were a number of ergonomic and functional “paper cuts,” though several of the research goals were met, at least to some extent.
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Massacring C Pointers (2018)
I'm taking a break from debugging books to talk about a calamitous shitshow of textbook writing: Mastering C Pointers: Tools for Programming Power , by Robert J. Traister.