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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 375 posts.

Programming Languages
2025
339

I Wrote a WebAssembly VM in C

For the last 6 months, I’ve been spending my (limited) free time on evenings and weekends writing a WebAssembly VM in C. After repeatedly throwing away small side-projects, this was an extremely productive experience for me as an engineer. I’m writing this in order to put together some take-aways and organize my…

343

Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

Swift continues to grow in popularity as a cross-platform language supporting a wide variety of use cases, with support on a variety of embedded devices, form factors that encompass wearables to server, and a wide variety of operating systems. As Swift expands, there’s value in investing in matching cross-platform…

352

Rust’s worst feature

There are several aspects of Rust that I’m not particularly fond of but the one that takes the cake is core::io::BorrowedBuf which I despise with passion. It’s a nightly feature which puts in question my extreme emotions about it. On the other hand it means there’s time to stop it from getting stabilised and figure…

353

The Simplicity of Prolog

Nowadays the most popular programming languages are Python, Javascript, Java, C++, C#, Kotlin and Ruby, and the average programmer is probably familiar with one or more of these languages. It's relatively easy to switch from one to another (barring any framework specific knowledge that may be needed), since they are…

355

Tilde, My LLVM Alternative

I'm Yasser and I've made it my mission to produce an alternative to LLVM, the current king of compiler backend libraries. I'm calling it Tilde (or TB for tilde backend) and the reasons are pretty simple, i believe it's far too slow at compiling and far too big to be fixed from the inside. It's been 20 years and cruft…