The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 427 posts.
COBOL is often a source of amusement for programmers because it is seen as old, verbose, clunky, and difficult to maintain. COBOL can now be used to write code for Cloudflare’s serverless platform Workers.
Ruby's native I/O methods traditionally blocked the calling fiber, leaving event-loop libraries to provide replacement wrappers. This Ruby Concurrency Progress Report presents a lightweight per-thread Fiber Scheduler which lets those native operations cooperate with an event loop. It explains the implementation and…
Zig is a general-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust , optimal , and reusable software. With special thanks to many generous sponsors , the Zig project is financially sustainable and currently supports one full-time developer . Let's reboot systems programming.
Programming language performance is something that nearly everyone cares about at some point, whether they realise it or not. If you’re a programmer, you sometimes have to make your programs run fast; if you’re a user, you might be frustrated at a program that runs slowly, without knowing that it’s caused by a poor…
Shopify's involvement with TruffleRuby began half a year ago, with the goal of furthering the success of the project and Ruby community. TruffleRuby is an alternative implementation of the Ruby language (where the reference implementation is CRuby, or MRI) developed by Oracle Labs. TruffleRuby has high potential in…
From a confusing page of old C code to APL/J praise.
A recent tweet by a friend of mine noted how the public interest in the Scala programming language seems to have plateaued or waned, which matches my feeling of the latest trends and zeitgeist. This blog post will go into why I think that has happened, where Scala stands now, and what the future holds for the Scala…
Why I can't use Elm, and can't recommend it to others.
Google's plans on making Swift the first mainstream language with first-class language-integrated differentiable programming capabilities. What's so cool about Swift?
Recently withoutboats posted a series of blog posts about some syntax sugar he would like added to Rust.
At Channable, we process several billion product data records for our customers every day according to user-customizable rules. Internally, this work is subdivided into jobs, where one job takes a set of products and the rules for how to process them as input, and returns the transformed set of products as output…
This expression: (1 2) represents the list containing the integers 1 and 2 in that order. If you want an empty list, that’s just () . And the list of the first five letters of the alphabet is just (\a \b \c \d \e) .
It took three years and 200,000 words more than I expected, but my second book, Crafting Interpreters , is complete. I finished the third draft of the last chapter today, marking the last of around 1,400 days of continuous writing.
We are very proud to announce Nim version 1.2 after six months of continuous development!
Every now and then I like to think about topics that don't directly relate to my daily work. One of those topics has been parsers: back in January I wrote about byte-ordered stream parsing and how I think we can improve streaming parsing in Rust with a small set of API additions.
Currently the main goal of the Crystal core team is to reach 1.0 in the near future. Since achieving that goal involves a number of non-obvious tradeoffs, we want to use this post to shed some light on those inherent tensions and how they drive our work and priorities for the next few releases.
Discover the new -fanalyzer option coming to GCC 10 that provides a static analysis pass to identify problems at compile-time, rather than at runtime.
With cljfx and Java 14 it’s finally here
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
How many of you have listened, read or taken part in a discussion about programming languages that goes like the following: Person A: "Pro...
The other day I read 20 most significant programming languages in history, a “preposterous table I just made up.” He certainly got preposterous right: he lists Go as “most significant” but not ALGOL, Smalltalk, or ML. He also leaves off Pascal because it’s “mostly dead”. Preposterous! That defeats the whole point of…
Jane Street is a quantitative trading firm and liquidity provider with a unique focus on technology and collaborative problem solving.
In late 1986 and early 1987 an ad hoc group of Smalltalk implementors got together to see if they could agree on a design for the next major version of Smalltalk, after Smalltalk-80. The intent was that what they agreed upon would feed into an IEEE standardization process. That process never got
An in-depth Look at OCaml’s new "Best-fit" Garbage Collector Strategy The Garbage Collector probably is OCaml’s greatest unsung hero. Its pragmatic approach allows us to allocate without much fear of efficiency loss. In a way, the fact that most OCaml hackers know little about it is a good sign:...
