The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,707 posts.
EDIT: Part 2 is up! It's a pedagogical pet peeve of mine when technical concepts are simply listed in their fully developed state, with little in the way of motivation, derivation, or historical context. This, I think, is like publishing a cookbook filled with beautiful pictures of cakes, but
Enums are one of the most popular features in Rust. An enum is a type whose value is one of a specified set of variants.
It is a somewhat common question to me: how do we write C in curl to make it safe and secure for billions of installations? Some precautions we take and decisions we make. There is no silver bullet, just guidelines. As I think you can see for yourself below they are also neither strange nor … Continue reading Writing…
The materials for the course on compilers: built incrementally and fully in tagless-final style
A blog about computers, functional languages, Lisp, and Scheme.
Since the early days of automatic computing we have had people that have felt it as a shortcoming that programming required the care and accuracy that is characteristic for the use of any formal symbolism. They blamed the mechanical slave for its strict obedience with which it carried out its given instructions, even…
If someone had told me a few months ago I’d be playing with .NET again after a 15+ years hiatus I probably would have laughed at this.1 Early on in my career I played with .NET and Java, and even though .NET had done some things better than Java (as it had the opportunity to learn from some early Java mistakes), I…
Some good news is coming in Rust 1.86
I announce Xee, the implementation of XPath and XSLT in Rust that I've been working on for the last two years.
This new edition has been the occasion to overhaul the presentation in many places, but its main purpose is the update to the new C standard, C23 . The goal was to publish this new edition of Modern C at the same time as the new C standard goes through the procedure of ISO publication. The closest approximation of the…
In this post, I talk about my favorite C/C++ pattern involving macros.
The C++ standard library (also know as the STL) is, without a doubt, an astounding piece of work. Its scope, performance and incredible back...
This story is about concurrent data structures in the context of Ruby. The goal here is to demonstrate how true parallelism can be achieved with global mutable state (which at the time of writing, is not supported by built-in Ruby primitives).
Types in coding projects are good. Don’t be afraid to create them when you need to.
After the Graz, Austria February 2025 WG14 Meeting, I am now confident in the final status of the defer TS, and it is now time.
A deep dive into the performance of Python 3.14's tail-call interpreter: How the performance results were confounded by an LLVM regression, the surprising complexity of compiling interpreter loops, and some reflections on performance work, software engineering, and optimizing compilers.
This post describes how to compile a single C++ source file to an object file with the Clang API. Here is the code. It behaves like a simplified clang executable that handles -c and -S…
9 months ago, I took a gander at PG’s guide to Bel . If you haven’t read it, here’s the premise:
Karl Seguin's Blog - A mix of coding and creative writing
TL;DR ¶ Some of the wisdom contained in Josh Bloch’s Effective Java book is relevant to Go. panic and recover are best reserved for exceptional circumstances. Reliance on panic and recover can noticeably slow down execution, incurs heap allocations, and precludes inlining. Internal handling of failure cases via panic…
My Python code was too slow, so I made it faster with Python. For some definition of “Python”.
I recently took some time to try Gleam, the type-safe language that runs on the Erlang virtual machine. For a couple of weeks, I used it to build a little feed aggregator. These are my notes.
First part of a series of articles about writing a .NET Garbage Collector in C# using NativeAOT. This part sets the expectations and setups the project, dealing with the first difficulties.
The first of a series of envisioned blog posts on lambda calculus, and Lisp. It’s unclear exactly where to start: there is a whole heap of interesting issues, both theoretical and in terms of concrete implementations, which tangle and interconnect. A particular application of lambda calculus is a very salient…
Have you ever wondered how a compiler works, but you never found courage to find out? Then this series of articles is for you. I have never had the chance to look under the hood either, but one week-end I have decided to to write a translator from the esoteric programming language wend (short for week-end), which I…
Finally sitting down to learn Rust and how to write parsers.
This is a personal pick of the most interesting projects, tools, libraries and articles that popped-up in Common Lisp land in the last two years.Newcomers might not realize how the Common Lisp ecosystem, though stable in many ways, actually evolves, sharpens, tries new solutions, proposes new tools, ships new…
I really love Rust. I’ve been using it as my language of choice for about ten years now. I believe that it is a remarkably well designed language, and that includes the parts that are often most criticized, most notably async.
