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Types are a basic tool of software design (2018)
Static or dynamic, a program's design is written in its types.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 246 posts.
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Ada's dependent types, and its types as a whole
So I like to joke occasionally on the Fediverse that when looking at Wikipedia's list of programming languages supporting dependent types :
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Implementing SM-2 in Rust
An implemenation of the SuperMemo-2 algorithm.
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Lua is so underrated
Introduction The more I learn about Lua's design and implementation, the more impressed I am. It's very rare to see software that does so much with so lit...
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Into CPS, Never to Return
CPS, or continuation-passing style, is an intermediate representation for programs, particularly functional programs. It’s used in compilers for languages such as SML and Scheme. Much of its utility comes from its support for tail calls and nonlocal control flow such as call/cc, but it can also be used as an…
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C++ is an absolute blast
Where I try to explain why I feel like C\+\+ is so much fun, and to correct some misinformation.
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The intricacies of implementing memoization in Ruby
A long time ago, I wrote a memoization library for Ruby. It was not easy, but I learned a great deal in the process. In this article, I am share these learnings and showing you how deep the memoization rabbit hole goes.
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What would it take to add refinement types to Rust?
A few years ago, on a whim, I wrote YAIOUOM. YAOIOUM was a static analyzer for Rust that checked that the code was using units of measures correctly, e.g. a distance in meters is not a distance in centimeters, dividing meters by seconds gave you a value in m / s (aka m * s^-1). YAIOUOM was an example of a refinement…
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Four limitations of Rust's borrow checker
I’ve been using Rust for hobby projects since 2016 and have been working professionally in Rust since 2021, so I tend to consider myself pretty knowledgeable about Rust. I’m already familiar with all the common limitations of Rust’s type system and how to work around them, so it’s pretty rare that I have to “fight the…
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Curl removes experimental HTTP back end in Rust
The ride is coming to an end. The experiment is done. We tried, but we admit defeat. Four years ago we started adding support for an alternative HTTP backend in curl. It would use a library written in rust, called hyper. The idea was to introduce an alternative implementation of HTTP internals that you could ……
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How types make hard problems easy
A deep dive into how I use types to the fullest
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Java in the Small
Java has many features that make it well suited for large, long-lasting projects. But I find it surprisingly good for small tasks as well. Recent language features make it even better. The killer features are compile-time typing and great tool support.
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How we centralized and structured error handling in Golang
Handling errors in Go is simple and flexible – yet no structure! It’s supposed to be simple, right? Just return an error , wrapped with a message, and move on. Well, that simplicity quickly turns into chaotic as our codebase grows with more packages, more developers, and more “quick fixes” that stay there forever…
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Crunch – a Scheme compiler with a minimal runtime
Hi, I'm Peter Bex, a Scheme and free software enthusiast from the Netherlands. See my user page on the CHICKEN wiki or my git server for some of my projects.
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Using Drop for safety in Rust
A deep dive into Rust’s vec::Drain and its Drop implementation as an example of how ownership prevents subtle bugs—memory and otherwise!
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In-Depth Ruby Concurrency: Navigating the Ruby Concurrency Landscape
I was honored to present a talk on Ruby concurrency at RubyConf 2024. It represents a high-level distillation of much of my writing and research over the past year. The conference itself was great, and presenting was such a fun experience. Here is the talk, titled “In-Depth Ruby Concurrency: Navigating the Ruby…
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Garbage collected smart pointers in Rust via concurrent cycle collection
Scheme to the Spec is a series on the more complex, often overlooked aspects of programming language implementation.
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Common misconceptions about compilers
A curated list of misconceptions about mainstream compilers.
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Speeding up Ruby by rewriting C in Ruby
There is a recent language comparison repo which has been getting shared a lot. In it, CRuby was the third slowest option, only beating out R and Python. The repo author, @BenjDicken, created a fun visualization of each language’s performance. Here’s one of the visualizations, which shows Ruby as the third slowest…
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8 months of OCaml after 8 years of Haskell in production (2023)
Dmitrii Kovanikov's Personas Web Space
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Bicameral, Not Homoiconic
Parenthetically Speaking: Articles by Shriram Krishnamurthi
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Move semantics in Rust, C++, and Hylo
I just finished reading the paper Borrow checking Hylo . It outlines the basic design of Hylo . Hylo is an early-stage programming language, but unlike other contenders of C++, it provides memory safety like rust. Specifically it merges rust’s borrow checking ideas into the framework of moveable value semantics (MVS)…
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Cursed Linear Types in Rust
Inspired by Jack Wrenn’s post on Undroppable Types in Rust, I set out to see if it’s possible to create types that must be used exactly once. From my understanding, those things are called linear types, but don’t quote me on that1. Unless you are quoting the title of this article which explicitly says linear types… I…
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Janet for Mortals (2023)
I wrote a book. It’s called Janet for Mortals, and it’s free, and it’s on the internet, and you can read it right now. And you should read it right now, instead of reading this blog post, because this blog post is not very interesting if you haven’t read the book. Heck, this blog post is not very interesting even if…
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The two factions of C++
The dream of a single dialect-free C++ has probably been dead for many years, anyway.
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From string to AST: parsing (2019)
Whether you have to do with data in the form of CSV, JSON or a full-blooded programming language like C, JavaScript, Scala, or maybe a query language like SQL, you always transform some sequence of characters (or binary values) into a structured representation. Whatever you’ll do with that representation depends on…
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Code Conversion Language (2019)
Update : I forgot that I did a brief analysis on this many years ago, using ROT13 as example.
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Hyrum’s Law in Golang
Occurrence of Hyrum's law in Golang
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Lush: My favorite small programming language
I meant to write about this when I started my blog in 2009. Eventually Lush kind of faded out of my consciousness, as it was a lot easier to get work doing stuff in R or Matlab or whatever. The guy…
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Dear sir, you have built a compiler (2022)
I am afraid to inform you that you have built a compiler. I know you wanted a “simple prototype” that would just add that one feature to your programming model. You said that “SSA is an overkill” and “it’s just way too much infrastructure to maintain for a simple task” and yet, six months later, you have pile of…