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A tail calling interpreter for Python (already landed in CPython)
It’s been nearly four years since I published Parsing Protobuf at 2+GB/s: HowI Learned To Love Tail Calls inC.In that article, I presented a technique I co-d...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,707 posts.
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Rust Is Eating JavaScript (2023)
Why is Rust being used to replace parts of the JavaScript web ecosystem like minification (Terser), transpilation (Babel), formatting (Prettier), bundling (webpack), linting (ESLint), and more?
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Softmax forever, or why I like softmax
[UPDATE: Feb 8 2025] my amazing colleague Max Shen noticed a sign mistake in my derivation of the partial derivative of the log-harmonic function below.
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Ways to generate SSA
Static Single Assignment is a program representation where each “variable” (though this term can be misleading) is assigned exactly once. Mostly the variables aren’t variables at all, but instead names for values—for expressions. SSA is used a lot in compilers. See this lesson from Cornell for converting Bril to SSA…
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What about K?
k is a family of concise, fast vector-oriented languages designed by Arthur Whitney . Calling k a “family” is deliberate; there is no single definitive k, but instead a sequence of slightly incompatible versions. If you decide to stick with k, you’ll see mentions of k4 , k5 etc. Exactly what those numbers mean aren’t…
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How does Ada's memory safety compare against Rust?
A comparison of how well Rust and Ada prevent the most common memory-related software errors.
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Baffled by generational garbage collection – wingolog
wingolog: article: baffled by generational garbage collection
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Carbon is not a programming language (sort of)
Within C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out.
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The inevitability of the borrow checker
When defining a type in Inko , it's allocated on the heap by default. For example (using the syntax for the upcoming 0.18.0 release):
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Scala 3 Migration: Report from the field
April 30, 2024. I decided to dedicate a week to migrate our main project at work (a multiplayer mobile game server in production for over 4 years) from Scala...
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I believe 6502 instruction set is a good first assembly language
Why I believe 6502 instruction set is a good first assembly language
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Go Data Structures: Interfaces (2009)
Go's interfaces—static, checked at compile time, dynamic when asked for—are, for me, the most exciting part of Go from a language design point of view. If I could export one feature of Go into other languages, it would be interfaces.
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Go Data Structures (2009)
When explaining Go to new programmers, I've found that it often helps to explain what Go values look like in memory, to build the right intuition about which operations are expensive and which are not. This post is about basic types, structs, arrays, and slices.
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I coded a Pascal compiler for transputer as a teen in 1993
History of the development of my Pascal compiler for transputer when I was age 13.
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Zig; what I think after months of using it
Ah, Zig . I have a love-hate relationship with this one. A “new” (reading: appeared a couple years ago , already — yes, already ), language with high ambitions. Zig was made to run at low-level, with a simple design to solve many problems C has (macros, allocators, error handling, more powerful types like baked-in…
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I Wrote a WebAssembly VM in C
For the last 6 months, I’ve been spending my (limited) free time on evenings and weekends writing a WebAssembly VM in C. After repeatedly throwing away small side-projects, this was an extremely productive experience for me as an engineer. I’m writing this in order to put together some take-aways and organize my…
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The Language Construction Kit (1996, 2012)
Caja de herramientas para construir idiomas (en español; traducido por Renato Montes) O Kit de Construção de Línguas (em português; traduzido por Gustavo Pereira) Il Kit di Costruzione di Linguaggi (in italiano; tradotto per Daniele "MadMage" Calisi) Der Sprachbaukasten (auf Deutsch; übersetzt von Carsten Becker)
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Fixing left and mutual recursions in grammars
Left & Mutual Recursion Mitigation
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Falsehoods programmers believe about null pointers
Null pointers look simple on the surface, and that’s why they’re so dangerous. As compiler optimizations, intuitive but incorrect simplifications, and platform-specific quirks have piled on, the odds of making a wrong assumption have increased, leading to the proliferation of bugs and vulnerabilities. This article…
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Hard Mode Rust (2022)
This post is a case study of writing a Rust application using only minimal, artificially constrained API (eg, no dynamic memory allocation). It assumes a fair bit of familiarity with the language.
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In Zig, what's a writer?
Karl Seguin's Blog - A mix of coding and creative writing
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Go 1.24's go tool is one of the best additions to the ecosystem in years
Why I'm very excited about `go tool` landing in Go 1.24.
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Better Know a Ruby Thing: Singleton Classes
Write an awesome description for your new site here. It will appear in your document head meta (for Google search results) and in your feed.xml site description.
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Rust’s worst feature
There are several aspects of Rust that I’m not particularly fond of but the one that takes the cake is core::io::BorrowedBuf which I despise with passion. It’s a nightly feature which puts in question my extreme emotions about it. On the other hand it means there’s time to stop it from getting stabilised and figure…
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The Simplicity of Prolog
Nowadays the most popular programming languages are Python, Javascript, Java, C++, C#, Kotlin and Ruby, and the average programmer is probably familiar with one or more of these languages. It's relatively easy to switch from one to another (barring any framework specific knowledge that may be needed), since they are…
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Tilde, My LLVM Alternative
I'm Yasser and I've made it my mission to produce an alternative to LLVM, the current king of compiler backend libraries. I'm calling it Tilde (or TB for tilde backend) and the reasons are pretty simple, i believe it's far too slow at compiling and far too big to be fixed from the inside. It's been 20 years and cruft…
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Context should go away for Go 2 (2017)
As usual, when a new blog post comes out on blog.golang.org, I’m all eager to read it as soon as possible. The most recent one, Contributors Summit, is a nice write-up on the issues that the Go contributors have been talking about. While reading it, I stumbled upon a sentence that made me write this post. Here is is…
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