Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 26 posts.
Why does this matter? As Steve Yegge said , "If you don't know how compilers work, then you don't know how computers work." Yegge describes 8 problems that can be solved with compilers (or equally well with interpreters, or with Yegge's typical heavy dosage of cynicism).
My VLSI tools take a chip from conception through testing. Perhaps 500 lines of source code. Cadence, Mentor Graphics do the same, more or less. With how much source/object code?
This PEP introduces a syntax for adding arbitrary metadata annotations to Python functions 1.
This PEP proposes the merger of the Unladen Swallow project 3 into CPython’s source tree. Unladen Swallow is an open-source branch of CPython focused on performance. Unladen Swallow is source-compatible with valid Python 2.6.4 applications and C extensi...
Writing and Stuff from Isaac Z. Schlueter
The Scheme part of the name PLT Scheme is misleading, and it is often an obstacle to explaining and promoting PLT research and tools.
The draft of " Yacc is Dead " that David Darais and I posted on arXiv received some attention, so we'd like to share updates and feedback.
Oh, Steve, you do make me laugh, always. And it's so long between posts these days I hardly believed it when Safari hinted that there was some action over at Steve's. Thank you.
An introduction to the Go's defer, panic, and recover control flow mechanisms.
(You probably already have realized this.) The reason the compiler produced code that terminated was based upon the fact that the values being altered (i.e., a, b and c) within the “while” loop are never referenced again after the loop. But, once you added code which printed the resulting values it was forced to…
I’ve been doing a lot of work, lately, with JavaScript inheritance – namely for my work-in-progress JavaScript book – and in doing so have examined a number of different JavaScript classical-inheritance-simulating techniques. Out of all the ones that I’ve looked at I think my favorites were the implementations…
Urbit is a static functional namespace : a programming environment specified as a single stateless, frozen function. The Urbit function is ...
Clojure is written in terms of abstractions. There are abstractions for sequences, collections, callability, etc. In addition, Clojure supplies many implementations of these abstractions. The abstractions are specified by host interfaces, and the implementations by host classes. While this was sufficient for…
A major Python update has just been moved from the testing repositories and will be available on a mirror near you. The default "python" package is now for the 3.x series while the 2.x series has been moved to a "python2" package, with python-2.7 having been scheduled to be the last major release in the python-2.x…
In addition to parsing and generating machine code for your source files when valid, a compiler frontend's job is also to detect invalid code and give you a hint that explains what is wrong so you can fix the problem.
Today we are introducing Crankshaft, a new compilation infrastructure for V8, Google Chrome’s JavaScript engine. By using aggressive optimi...
There are a thousand programming languages out there (Literally, it seems, according to people who actually count such things.) A classification of so many species is bound to be complex and subjec…
First Shugo announced them at RubyKaigi. Then Matz showed some improved syntax at RubyConf. But what are refinements [http://redmine.ruby-lang.org/issues/show/4085] all about, and what would they be used for? The first thing you need to understand is that the purpose of refinements in Ruby
If you read the LLVM 2.7 release notes carefully you would have noticed that one of the new external users is the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC). As the author of the LLVM backend for GHC, I have been invited to write a post detailing the design of the backend and my experiences with using LLVM.
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
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 .
Though Frank Sinatra says it best , “I’m leaving today” isn’t exactly accurate; my last day as a Microsoft employee was July 23rd, 2010. This post is almost two weeks delayed as Felicia and I have been on the road since the 26th, driving cross-country to the east coast; we also decided to leave Seattle in favor of New…
