Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 97 posts.
Clojure is a dynamic language. Among other things this means that type annotations are not required for code to run. While Clojure has some support for type hints, they are not an enforcement mechanism, nor comprehensive, and are limited to communicating information to the compiler to aid in efficient code generation…
Some time later, I came across Iavor’s "jokes" page, including a funny bit called “ The Evolution of a Programmer ” in which the traditional imperative "Hello, world" program is developed through several variations, from simple beginnings to a ridiculously complex extreme. A moment’s thought turned up the factorial…
QBE is a compiler backend that aims to provide 70% of the performance of industrial optimizing compilers in 10% of the code. QBE fosters language innovation by offering a compact user-friendly and performant backend. The size limit constrains QBE to focus on the essential and prevents embarking on a never-ending path…
The spec library ( API docs ) specifies the structure of data, validates or conforms it, and can generate data based on the spec.
Free downloads for building and running .NET apps on Linux, macOS, and Windows. Runtimes, SDKs, and developer packs for .NET Framework, .NET, and ASP.NET.
Some people, when confronted with a problem, think “I know, I’ll use cgo.” Now they have two problems.
A common problem I see in object-oriented design is: A wizard is a kind of player. A warrior is a kind of player. A staff is a kind of weapon. A sword is a kind of weapon. A player has a weapon. Bu…
This is a loose transcript (or long paraphrasing?) of a presentation given at ConnectDev'16, a conference organized by Genetec in which I was invited to speak.
Announcing the Go font family, by Bigelow & Holmes.
Improve the start-up time of both small and large Java applications, with at most a limited impact on peak performance.
Integer overflow detection/handling in Rust is sometimes misunderstood.
This is a draft I wrote in early 2015 and never got around to publishing. Here’s the mostly unpolished version because it wasn’t doing anybody any good sitting in my drafts folder. The simplest change was updating year 2015 to 2016 at publication time.
Slack uses PHP for most of its server-side application logic, which is an unusual choice these days. Why did we choose to build a new project in this language? Should you? Most programmers who have only casually used PHP know two things about it: that it is a bad language, which they would never use if…
“If you don’t know how compilers work, then you don’t know how computers work. If you’re not 100% sure whether you know how compilers work, then you don’t know how they work.” — Steve Yegge There you have it. Think about it. It doesn’t really matter …
Random code snippets, projects and musings about software from Eric Kidd, a developer and occasional entrepreneur.
The Scala language is large and complex, and it provides a variety of tools that a developer can use to do the same thing in a variety of ways. Given the range of possible solutions to every problem, how can a developer choose which one should be used? This is the first in a series of blog posts aiming to provide…
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This paper appears in Lisp and Symbolic Computation , Volume 1, No. 1, June 1988, pp81-101.
This PEP specifies how Python software packages should specify what build dependencies they have in order to execute their chosen build system. As part of this specification, a new configuration file is introduced for software packages to use to specify...
Recently we (Felix, Niko, and I) have been working on getting compiler-level GC support for Rust. The plan is to provide a base set of APIs and …
A few weeks ago, on a whim my friend and I decided to hackathon our way through an app to help us learn how to play guitar . In a stroke of inspiration, we decided to learn something new, and do the project in the Elm programming language , about which I had heard many good things.
There are about six major conceptualizations of memory, which I’m calling “memory models”, that dominate today’s programming.
Why your JavaScript events are coming in quicker now.
I've recently been exploring the exciting new world of asynchronous I/O libraries in Python 3 – specifically asyncio and curio . These two libraries make some different design choices. This is an essay that I wrote to try to explain to myself what those differences are and why I think they matter, and distill some…
Students often ask for a recommendation on what language they should learn next. If you're looking for a job in industry, my reply is to learn whatever is hot right now: C++, Java and C#--and probably Python, Ruby, PHP and Perl too.
Jonan: Welcome everyone. Today we are doing an interview to talk about new features coming in Ruby 3. I am here with my coworker, Sasada Koichi san....
This document serves as a collection of reasons why beginners should avoid Python 3 as of November 22nd, 2016. I give two sets of reasons as I see them now. One for total beginners, and another for people who are more knowledgeable about programming. The first section attempts to explain the case against starting with…
One thing that works well in practice in cases where you really don’t want to process single bytes at a time is to use a union for going from one type to another. Granted, writing one member of a union and reading from a different one also isn’t allowed per the standard, but every compiler I’ve come across allows it…
