The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,709 posts.
Updated (2023-05-08): the Go compiler keeps evolving and it takes time to keep up with changes. While the general gist of this post remains true and it's worth reading to understand how the compiler works on a high level, the details of the modifications are slightly different now.
Image differentiation in three languages
Sircmpwn (the main developer behind the Sway Wayland compositor ) recently wrote a blog post about how he thinks Rust is not a good C replacement . I don’t know if he’d like the D programming language either, but it’s become a C replacement for me.
One of the frequent challenges in C is that pointers are nothing but a memory address. A callee who is passed a pointer doesn’t truly know anything other than the type of object being pointed at, which says some things about alignment and how that pointer can be used… maybe. If it’s a pointer to void ( void * ) then…
Only dead fish go with the flow. As I promised in the last article, today we’re finally going to do a deep dive into the topic of scopes. This is what we’re going to learn today: We’re going to learn about scopes, why they are useful, and …
Me and my close friends have been interested in starting a project together and I suggested we use Haskell. I do not think the suggestion was received well or perhaps in seriousness. I have a tendency to joke about almost everything and have put forward that we use many interesting but not practical languages in the…
Writing a lisp compiler from scratch in JavaScript: 6. LLVM system calls
I’ve seen the inside of the Google and Amazon tech stacks. There are common threads that run through them and also, I bet, through most BigTechCos. Here and there down the stack is a lot of C++ and vestigial remnants from earlier days, Perl or PHP or whatever. Out in front of humans, of course, JS. But in between…
Or rather, an object is a set of functions that operate on implied data elements.
During my final term at UWaterloo I took the CS444 compilers class with a project to write a compiler from a substantial subset of Java to x86, in teams of up to three people with a language of the group’s choice. This was a rare opportunity to compare implementations of large programs that all did the same thing…
Real world example where uniform syntax enables unthinkable solution
When I first started programming in Go, my summary of it was, “The good things are great and the bad things are weird and I can live with them.” After another three years and a few large projects in Go, I no longer like the language and wouldn’t use it for a new project. Here are 10 reasons why, in no particular order.
This post describes the C++ Badge template used to enhance member function access control in Serenity Operating System.
I like Python, but wish it had static typing. The added safety would go a long way to improving quality and reducing development time. So today I tried to make use of type annotations and a static type-checker called mypy. After a few basic tests, I was excited. But my glee turned to disappointment rather […]
How do you design good abstractions? By using abstractions that already exist.
Sometimes the best features of Perl — and even more so of Perl 6 — are found by asking yourself, “I wonder if this’ll work?” and then findin...
When designing or, in some cases, implementing a programming language with built-in support for Unicode strings, an important decision must be made about how to represent or encode those strings in memory. Not all representations are equal, and there are trade-offs between different choices.
In my previous post I said that the lang team would be making our final decision about the syntax of the await operator in the May 23 meeting. That was last Thursday, and we did reach a decision. In brief, we decided to go forward with the preliminary proposal I outlined earlier: a postfix dot syntax, future.await…
Inspirations & experiments, mainly about denotative/functional programming in Haskell
A whirlwind tour of object-oriented code in F#
Many people struggled with my article about Alan Kay and OO programming, so let's talk about the main objection.
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…
