4021
Zig is hard but worth it
"I learned Zig in a weekend! …Six hours! …6µs!" say the blissful lizards. Followed by something to the effect of, "It’s easy to pick up because the syntax is so simple."
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 14,540 posts.
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Language Pragmatics Engineering
On best practices and gradient descent.
4024
Death by design patterns, or On the cognitive load of abstractions in the code
After many years coding in different teams — big and small — I think I can now finally explain to myself why and when do we need, or not…
4025
My first superoptimizer
I heard about these mythical programs that find optimal code through a brute-force search, but I didn't know how they worked. So I made one.
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How to Get Started with Tree-Sitter
Emacs 29 introduces tree-sitter support, a powerful parsing library that enhances its understanding of source code. With this integration, Emacs gains features like precise syntax highlighting, accurate indentation and easier extensibility. Here's how you install and configure Emacs with tree-sitter support.
4028
Lua: The Little Language That Could
An ode to Lua
4029
Why Learn Compilers (2021)
A sufficient understanding of computers is impossible without learning how compilers and their parts work. It is like stepping into the computer's mind and seeing how it feels from the inside. Compil...
4030
Let's make a Teeny Tiny compiler (2020)
Make your own BASIC to C compiler in Python.
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Integrating Zig and SwiftUI
Building a native GUI for a cross-platform application is a decades old problem. Nowadays, most people just don't and fallback to using a non-native experience such as Electron instead.
4033
That people produce HTML with string templates is telling us something
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
4034
Cases where full scans are better than indexes
Sometimes you have a lot of data, and one approach to support quick searches is pre-processing it to build an index so a search can involve only looking at a small fraction of the total data. The threshold at which it's worth switching to indexing, though, might be higher than you'd guess. Here are some cases I've…
4035
Lessons from Creating a VSCode Extension with GPT-4
Lately, I've been playing around with LLMs to write code.
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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.
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Why the original transformer figure is wrong, and some other tidbits about LLMs
A few months ago, I shared the article, Understanding Large Language Models: A Cross-Section of the Most Relevant Literature To Get Up to Speed, and the positive feedback was very motivating!
4038
A guide to closures in Rust
Understand how closures really work in Rust
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Let's Build a Compiler (1988)
This series of articles is a tutorial on the theory and practice of developing language parsers and compilers. Before we are finished, we will have covered every aspect of compiler construction, designed a new programming language, and built a working compiler.
4041
Instant flood fill with HTML Canvas
TLDR: Demo is at , code is at . The Problem When building a website or app using HTML Canvas, it’s often a requirement to support a flood fill. That is, when the user chooses a colour and cli…
4042
How to start a Go project in 2023
I previously wrote about starting a Go project in 2018. A lot has changed since I wrote that and I had been wanting to write an updated version. What follows should be enough for anyone new to Go to …
4043
Why I Use Elm in 2023
Building UIs in HTML+CSS can be untenable. When making complex frontend experiences, I reach for Elm.
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The AARD Code and DR DOS (2021)
In this long article, I, being as far as I know the first outside Microsoft to have learnt how the AARD code works, explain that I condemn its form but broadly sympathise with its function.
4045
Demystifying Tupper's Formula
A book I was recently reading mentioned a mathematical curiosity I haven't seen before - Tupper's self-referential formula . There are some resources about it online, but this post is my attempt to explain how it works - along with an interactive implementation you can try in the browser.
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Io uring
Introduced in 2019 (kernel 5.1) by Jens Axboe, io_uring (henceforth uring) is a system for providing the kernel with a schedule of system calls, and receiving the results as they're generated. Whereas epoll and kqueue support multiplexing, where you're told when you can usefully perform a system call using some set of…
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The many faces of DISTINCT in Postgres (2017)
3 interesting uses of DISTINCT in PostgreSQL
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Memory Allocation
A visual introduction to memory allocation.
4049
How much memory do you need to run 1M concurrent tasks?
In this blog post, I delve into the comparison of memory consumption between asynchronous and multi-threaded programming across popular languages like Rust, ...
4050
Building a Handheld PC
I’d like to share with you my latest project: Decktility!