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3167

When the Compiler Bites

So far this year I’ve been bitten three times by compiler edge cases in GCC and Clang, each time catching me totally by surprise. Two were caused by historical artifacts, where an ambiguous specification lead to diverging implementations. The third was a compiler optimization being far more clever than I expected…

3172

Native Clojure with GraalVM

The newly-released GraalVM changes the status quo in the realm of JVM-based programming languages. In this instalment we’ll explore its impact on Clojure. We’ll start small, but by the end we’ll compile an entire Ring web application into a self-contained native binary.

3175

Programming Bottom-Up (1993)

(This essay is from the introduction to On Lisp .) It's a long-standing principle of programming style that the functional elements of a program should not be too large. If some component of a program grows beyond the stage where it's readily comprehensible, it becomes a mass of complexity which conceals errors as…

3177

Towards Scala 3

Now that Scala 2.13 is only a few months away, it’s time to consider the roadmap beyond it. It’s been no secret that the work on Dotty over the last 5 years was intended to explore what a new Scala could look like. We are now at a stage where we can commit: Dotty will become Scala 3.0.

3180

Parsing: a timeline

In India, Panini creates an exact description of the Sanskrit language, including pronunciation. Sanskrit can be completely reconstructed using nothing but Panini's grammar. Panini's grammar, which predates Euclid, is probably the first formal system of any kind. In the future, nothing like it will exist for any other…