The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,707 posts.
Like the blip of an intro on the front page says, my degree was originally in music. My running joke as a web dev is that neither has meaningfully required me to count past 32. And while my main concentration was vocals, I've since realized I should probably stop strictly calling this a nontechnical field, because my…
How costly it is to call functions and builtins in your python code? Does inlining help? How have the recent CPython releases improved performance in these areas?
The evolution of the C++ language continues to bring powerful features that enhance code safety, readability, and maintainability. Among these improvements, we got changes and additions to enum class functionalities across C++17, C++20, and C++23. In this blog post, we’ll explore these advancements, focusing on…
Go has good support for calling into assembly, and a lot of the fast cryptographic code in the stdlib is carefully optimized assembly, bringing speedups of over 20 times.
I became interested in implementing programming languages a few years ago and discovered [Crafting Interpreters](https://craftinginterpreters.com/) by Bob Nystrom. At the time, I had experience with Rust and decided to use it to follow the book. Albeit, being a noob, I managed to implement a fully functional bytecode…
Zig’s reflection combined with Zig’s ability to import C header files means Zig can be used for C macro reflection.
How bounded higher-kinded polymorphism arises in practice, and how to express it in OCaml, in several different ways. Some ways are rather concise -- but less widely known.
Lisp lets programs define new setf forms for assignment. The most common example is from CLOS , where a class like this:
I created a new intermediate language, called Bril, for teaching my funky open-source, hands-on compilers course. Because it’s for education, Bril prioritizes simplicity and regularity over more typical compiler priorities like performance and concision. This is an overview of Bril’s design, its quirks, and the…
A blog about functional programming
An overview of all the tools, standards and special languages used in the automotive industry where the official language is actually C.
Clojure macros have two modes: avoid them at all costs/do very basic stuff, or go absolutely crazy.
The Pin type (and the concept of pinning in general) is a foundational building block on which the rest of the the Rust async ecosystem stands. Unfortunately, it has also been one of the least accessible and most misunderstood elements of async Rust. This post is meant to explain what Pin achieves, how it came to be…
👋🏼 This is part of series on concurrency, parallelism and asynchronous programming in Ruby. It’s a deep dive, so it’s divided into 12 main parts: Your Ruby programs are always multi-threaded: Part 1 Your Ruby programs are always multi-threaded: Part 2 Consistent, request-local state Ruby methods are colorless The…
continuing with the DNA theme… In Catalyst, a WebAssembly implementation of the OpenSmalltalk virtual machine, there are three linguistic levels in play: Smalltalk, JavaScript (JS), and WebAs…
(Discussion on HackerNews)
It has been three days. The room is cold and dark, but your screens are blinding. You feel disoriented as you come in and out of dissociative episodes. Now and again, you laugh, to no accompaniment. Why are you here? Was this your fault?
Good development practices for modern Python
I’ve noticed a small but interesting trend in the programming languages space. I’m not sure how novel it is, but this pattern, which I’ll refer to as “biphasic programming,” is characterized by languages and frameworks that enable identical syntax to express computations executed in two distinct phases or environments…
Pattern matching is a pervasive and powerful tool in Elixir. This isn't too surprising if you know a little about the history of Elixir's parent language, Erlang. Erlang was originally inspired by and written in Prolog, a logic programming language where pattern matching has first-class support. In
C is beautiful yet full of horrors. Here's to uncovering its hidden depths.
Recently, we had a discussion in our team about undefined behaviour (UB) in C. For those unfamiliar: We say that a program has undefined behaviour when we write code where the language specification doesn't define what should happen during execution. That means compilers can do whatever they like if they encounter…
(I've been editing this post on and off for almost a year. I'm not really happy with it, but I suspect I never will be.)
No, I’ve not gone to the click-baiters (“10 tips that will change your life today!!!”), but I chose to limit myself to just 10 so that I don’t pull what is considered a R…
It’s more than rails!
I was talking with someone today that really really wanted the sqrtps to be used in some code they were writing. And because of a quirk with clang (still there as of clang 18.1.0), if you happened to use -ffast-math clang would butcher the use of the intrinsic. So for the code: __m128 test(const __m128 vec) { return…
NOTE: This is based on, but completely rewritten, from a Twitter post:https://x.com/TheGingerBill/status/1802645945642799423TL;DR: It makes Go feel too "functional" rather than being an unabashed imperative language.I recently saw a post on Twitter showing the upcoming Go iterator design for Go 1.23 (August 2024)…
Anyone trying to make a new mainstream language is completely insane, unless they're backed by a large corporation. 0
Haskell is a programming language invented sometime in the 20th century by Scottish logicians as a prank. ¹ Fifteen years or so ago, for reasons I can no longer remotely recall, I started learning Haskell. Now, I have finally written a useful program in Haskell, and I am pretty sure I can do it again, if I ever need…
In 2011, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of MIT, the Boston Globe made a list of the most important innovations developed there. They asked me to explain the importance of SICP, and this is what I sent them:
