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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 283 posts.
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The compiler is your best friend
The compiler is a powerful tool, yet many developers have a painful relationship with it. Can we do better?
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Easel Turns One One year of building my own IDE in Clojure
Easel is an IDE written in Clojure that I've been working on for the last year. See it in action https://youtu.be/sceGtaNHxcM .
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The Algebra of Loans in Rust
The heart of Rust borrow-checking is this: when a borrow is taken, and until it expires, access to the borrowed place is restricted. For example you may not read from a place while it is mutably borrowed.
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How GNU Guile is 10x better (2021)
In Rust at Facebook by Fitzhardinge of the Mercurial team , Jeremy says that a new language must be 10x better at something than one of the (other) incumbent languages.
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Rust's Block Pattern
Here’s a little idiom that I haven’t really seen discussed anywhere, that I think makes Rust code much cleaner and more robust.
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Rust GCC backend: Why and how
Blog of Guillaume Gomez (Rust GCC backend: Why and how)
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Compiler Engineering in Practice
“Compiler Engineering in Practice” is a blog series intended to pass on wisdom that seemingly every seasoned compiler developer knows, but is not systematically written down in any textbook or online resource. Some (but not much) prior experience with compilers is needed.
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I tried Gleam for Advent of Code
A 12 day Advent of Code year convinced me Gleam is the real deal, thanks to Rust-like errors, great pipes, and surprisingly ergonomic FP.
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The Cost of a Closure in C
I had a vague idea that closures could have a variety of performance implications; I did not believe that so many of the chosen and potential designs for C and C++ extensions ones, however, were so…
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Common Lisp, ASDF, and Quicklisp: packaging explained
Common Lisp has good packaging tools, but they're different. Here we explain the what and how.
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Revisiting "Let's Build a Compiler"
There's an old compiler-building tutorial that has become part of the field's lore: the Let's Build a Compiler series by Jack Crenshaw (published between 1988 and 1995).
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Go Proposal: Secret Mode
Automatically erase memory to prevent secret leaks.
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Scala 3 slowed us down?
Is this clickbait? Not really. Is this the fault of the language or the compiler? Definitely not. Rather, it was part of a rushed migration. Sharing the lessons learned in the process.
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Eurydice: a Rust to C compiler
Perhaps the greatest surprise of the last two years was, for me, the realization that people not only care about compiling C to Rust (for obvious reasons, such as, ahem, memory safety) – they also care about compiling Rust to C! Wait, what?
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Perl's decline was cultural
There's been a flurry of discussion on Hacker News and other tech forums about what killed Perl. I wrote a lot of Perl in the mid 90s and subsequently worked on some of the most trafficked sites on the web in mod_perl in the early 2000s, so I have some thoughts. My take: it was mostly baked into the culture. Perl grew…
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Thoughts on Go vs. Rust vs. Zig
What do each of these languages value most?
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Golang's big miss on memory arenas
When your software team needs to pick a language today, you typically weigh two factors: language performance and developer velocity.
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Response to "Ruby Is Not a Serious Programming Language"
[5 min read] The question Sheon Han poses — “Is Ruby a serious programming language?” — says a lot about what someone thinks programming is supposed to fee...
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A Look at Rust from 2012
Recently I was scrolling through brson’s Rust quote database and stumbled upon a link to the official Rust tutorial from the very beginning of 2013. It says Rust 0.6 in the corner, but it lists many things that were removed in 0.6, so it’s likely closer to 0.5. I heard tales of old Rust before, but not of how the…
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Build a Compiler in Five Projects
Class website here: https://kmicinski.com/cis531-f25
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Several core problems with Rust
I used to call myself a Rust hater, but really I was doing it just to compensate for the perceivable fanboyism e.g. Rust tops on stackoverflow surveys as most-loved language. There are many reasons to hate C++, and I hate C++ too. Lots of people were waiting for a better programming language, but got Rust instead.
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Set theory with types
It is known that mathematics is heavily reliant on set theory, but no one can agree on what set theory is. Many people today understand that we have a choice between set theory and type theory , but they don’t know what type theory is either. Many think that type theory refers to some sort of dependent type theory, as…
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Go Cryptography State of the Union
I delivered my traditional Go Cryptography State of the Union talk at GopherCon US 2025 in New York. It goes into everything that happened at the intersection of Go and cryptography over the last year.
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PHP 8.5
A blog about modern PHP, the web, and programming in general. Follow my newsletter and YouTube channel as well.
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Inside Rust's std and parking_lot mutexes – who wins?
A teardown of Rust's mutex internals plus real benchmarks so you know when to choose std or parking_lot.
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The lost cause of the Lisp machines
I am just really bored by Lisp Machine romantics at this point: they should go away. I expect they never will....
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What Killed Perl?
Trick question! Perl is not dead. I’ll show you what I mean, and then still answer what I think killed Perl.
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`satisfies` is my favorite TypeScript keyword (2024)
TIL: `satisfies` is my favorite TypeScript keyword