The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,707 posts.
Let’s start with a question! Is this program well-defined? 1 2 3 4 int main() { while (true) ; } If you said yes, you’d be wrong — at least before C++26. A while (true); loop with no side effects used to be undefined behaviour. Compilers were free to assume it terminates, and some — Clang in particular — would…
From my experience, people like functions like "map" and "filter", but not "reduce".
Crystal is a compiled programming langauge with static type-checking with syntax very similar to the Ruby programming language . Something that keeps Crystal feeling like a dynamically typed language is how a variable can be assigned to multiple types throughout the course of its lifetime, unlike most statically typed…
Modern programming languages are full of violence, vulgar abbreviations, and naked imperatives. Bespoke is a statically typed alternative in which exceptions are regrettable circumstances, mutexes ...
A follow-along series of coding experiments as I explore Rust's peculiarities, from a C++ developer's perspective.
python has 6 pre-declared "constants": True , False , None , __debug__ , Ellipsis (or equivalently ... ), and NotImplemented . but they all behave slightly differently, for some reason.
TL;DR: I believe Odin's inline assembly is currently the best out of any language.The most important aspects are of this article listed below. I am not aware of any other assembly (GCC/Clang/Rust/Go...) that would combine all of these aspects:Inline assembly is organized into "templates", similar to and callable as…
When the address of a nested function is taken, GCC creates at trampoline at run-time. This trampoline is placed on the stack, which means that the stack has to be executable. This is problematic because a non-executable stack is an important security feature. For some time now, GCC has the option to place the…
After the ACE BASIC posts of the last months, this one is about a different project I have been working on for the last half year: CL-Amiga , or Clamiga for short. It is a Common Lisp implementation built for the Amiga family -- classic AmigaOS 3 on 68k and MorphOS as a fully native PPC build, AROS and AmigaOS 4 maybe…
The Pascal language was named after Blaise Pascal (see picture), a French mathematician who was a pioneer in computer development history. In 1641, at the age of eighteen, Pascal constructed the first arithmetical machine, arguably the first computer. He would improve upon the instrument eight years later. In 1650…
A blog about computers, functional languages, Lisp, and Scheme.
The best parts of Django are the ones you stop noticing — a tour of the abstractions that have given Buttondown the most leverage over the years.
If you are an Emacs user with a keen eye, you will have noticed that in Emacs Lisp, code is data. After all, 'Lisp' is shorthand for 'List Processing'. One of E...
As a member of the Zig core team, one of the most impactful projects I’ve been involved with is the implementation of incremental compilation into the Zig compiler. This feature allows the compiler to detect which individual functions and declarations have changed since a project was last built, recompile only that…
Forth is uncommonly used to teach programming to kids. Scripting languages like Python and visual environments like Scratch are far more popular options. But when I got the opportunity to introduce middle and high school students to programming, I chose the stack-oriented concatenative language from 1970. I was…
This chapter is a culmination of many macro techniques we have looked at so far in this book. Using macro abstractions we have developed, we create an implementation of one of my favourite programming languages: forth . Although this implementation embodies most of the important ideas of forth, it is very different…
Comparison of modern Lisp dialects
For the past year and a half, the team building Roc 's compiler has been rewriting our 300,000 lines of Rust code into Zig , for reasons I'll recap below. We recently passed an exciting milestone: feature parity with the original compiler!
Date: 2026-07-15 Git: https://gitlab.com/mort96/blog/blob/published/content/00000-home/00017-sqlite-editions.md
Meet G#: expressive data types, explicit nullability, and structured concurrency on .NET. Explore real examples and run your first project.
When Jarred joined the Zig community about 5 years ago, I described him as someone who had strong "beginner energy". That is, he moved fast and tried a lot of different stuff, jumping head first into problems that he was not yet equipped to solve, leading to mediocre outcomes in terms of engineering, but learning a…
Around 2000 I took an AI course at the University of Guelph. I don’t think I learned too much. We didn’t talk about neural networks, as far as I can remember. My end of term project was, I think, a pathfinding algorithm wearing an AI costume. There were certainly no discussions of transformers. No CUDA. No PyTorch…
A signals-and-noise course left me writing Monte Carlo math on paper and wishing the notation itself would run. Nine years later, with an AI agent doing the heavy lifting, NoiseLang became a real Monte Carlo language that runs the same fused kernel on the GPU, on every CPU core, and on WebAssembly.
Lately I've been spending time learning Scheme and using it to implement the concepts I'm learning in my physics classes as time permits. One of the most exciting things I've been doing with this is getting my Scheme to compile to the Web thanks to Hoot. One of the biggest challenges has been the fact that Hoot is…
Applying Alexis King's parse-don't-validate principle in TypeScript, where the type system fights back just enough to be annoying.
Introduction to Lisp programming on a PDP-1, with a hands-on practical focus
Ante has taken the first step towards something we all thought was impossible: blending reference counting and borrow checking without run-time crashes. 0
