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Pkl, a Programming Language for Configuration
We are delighted to announce the open source first release of Pkl (pronounced Pickle ), a programming language for producing configuration.
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 327 posts.
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Significant features introduced for recent versions of Perl
History of Perl releases since version 5.6, each with a summary of added or changed features.
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Compiling a Lisp (2020)
Overture to our small Lisp to x86-64 compiler
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The theory of concatenative combinators (2007)
This article attempts to outline, in informal terms, a new theory of combinators, related to the theory of Combinatory Logic pioneered by Moses Schonfinkel, Haskell Curry, and others in the 1930s. Although not essential, an understanding of the classical theory of combinators may be helpful (see the links at the…
305
A Tour of the Lisps
2023 seems to have been the year where I "made the rounds" of a number of major Lisps. There were several elements that lead to this. Firstly must have been my exposure to Elixir in 2022, which introduced me to the idea of debugging live systems and "staying in your program". Secondly must have been my chief complaint…
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Stem, a stack-based language with metaprogramming and a C FLI
My own concatenative programming language
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Embracing Common Lisp in the modern world
Explore how Common Lisp and Clojure shape modern programming, and discover why understanding these foundations is crucial for tech choices today
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Deadcode: Finding unreachable functions in Go
deadcode is a new command to help identify functions that cannot be called.
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scrapscript.py
Scrapscript is a small, pure, functional, content-addressable, network-first programming language. It’s designed to allow creating small, simply shareable programs. The language was created by Taylor Troesh and the main implementation was created by me and Chris.
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The end of "Useless Ruby sugar": On intuitions and evolutions
I wrote the analysis of “useless sugar” features of Ruby for two months, and I regret nothing.
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SaberVM
This post announces SaberVM, an abstract machine for functional programs that guarantees safety, reliability, and portability.
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Performance Analysis of Python's Dict() and {}
Some time ago, during a code review, I had a discussion with a colleague of mine about preferring dict() over {} in new Python code. They argued that dict() is more readable — and expresses intent more clearly — therefore should be preferred. I wasn’t convinced by that, but at that time I didn’t have any…
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C23: A Slightly Better C
One of the established and most popular programming languages is the C programming language. It is relatively easy to learn, and highly practical. Maybe surprisingly, the C programming language keeps evolving, slowly and carefully. If you have GCC 13 or LLVM (Clang) 16, you already have a compiler with some of the…
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Common Lisp's block / return-from and unwind-protect
I was just chatting with Ben Titzer on Twitter about control flow in his Virgil language (which is cool and you should definitely check ...
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Pratt Parsers: Expression Parsing Made Easy (2011)
Every now and then, I stumble onto some algorithm or idea that’s so clever and such a perfect solution to a problem that I feel like I got smarter or gained a new superpower just by learning it. Heaps were one, just about the only thing I got out of my truncated CS education. I recently stumbled onto another: Pratt or…
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The bane of my existence: Supporting both async and sync code in Rust
Sit beside me and hear this crazy old man's tale of when I asked Rust for too much
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Identifying Rust's collect:<Vec<_>>() memory leak footgun
Over the weekend, I was working on a personal Rust project when I ran into an excessive memory usage problem. After an evening of trial and error, I found a workaround to fix the memory usage, but I still didn’t understand how the issue was even possible, so I then spent another evening digging through the source code…
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White space does matter in C23
Usually in C identifiers are not directly followed by strings. But when U prefixed literals were introduced in C. there still were some rare clashes with existing code. This happened were a macro U…
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A lowering strategy for control effects in Rust
The Rust language has incrementally grown a set of patterns to support control-flow effects including error handling, iteration, and asynchronous I/O. In The registers of Rust , boats lays out four aspects of this pattern shared by Rust’s three effects. Today these effects are typically used in isolation, or at most…
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Crystal 1.11.0 Is Released
We are announcing a new Crystal release with several new features and bug fixes.
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OpenD, a D language fork that is open to your contributions
Contributing development work upstream to D leadership has always been a very frustrating process. While the oft-repeated claim that D is a closed-source language is not really true (the D-specific parts of the compiler were GPL'd as early as 2002, leading to an all-GPL compiler (what we now know as gdc) being…
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Is Fortran “A Dead Language”? (2022)
Some C++ folk seem to think so, but they're wrong!
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Python 3.13 Gets a JIT
Reviewing the JIT in Python 3.13
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Dennis Ritchie on the priorities of && || vs. == etc. (1982)
Early C had no separate operators for & and && or | and || . (Got that?) Instead it used the notion (inherited from B and BCPL ) of "truth-value context": where a Boolean value was expected, after "if" and "while" and so forth, the & and | operators were interpreted as && and || are now; in ordinary expressions, the…
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SIMD in Pure Python
First of all, this article is an exercise in recreational "because I can" programming. If you just want to make your Python code go fast, this is perhaps not the article for you. And perhaps Python is not the language you want, either!
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Go: What we got right, what we got wrong
This is my closing talk ( video ) from the GopherConAU conference in Sydney, given November 10, 2023, the 14th anniversary of Go being lau...