The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 5,637 posts.
By now it is difficult to imagine that once there was a time when the utility, and even the possibility, of recursion in programming was in doubt. Yet that was true of the programming community aro…
Since Brendan Eich wrote the first SpiderMonkey version in 1995, there have been many, many changes to its internal string representation. New string types like ...
I know a thing or two about Objective-C. It’s not bragging. If you’re reading my blog, there’s a decent chance that I know more about Objective-C …
I have recently looked at Julia , a new programming language developed at MIT that promises to be a dynamic programming language that is sui...
Over the past year, the WebKit project made tremendous progress on the ability to optimize JavaScript applications. A major part of that effort was the introduction of the Fourth Tier LLVM (FTL) JIT.
This post follows up on OCaml for Haskellers from Edward Z. Yang (2010) and my own Haskell for OCaml programmers from earlier this year. Note The latest version of this document can be found online at https://dr-knz.net/rust-for-functional-programmers.html. Alternate formats: Source, PDF. Prologue Rust for C…
First an update on progress. You probably noticed this post took quite a while to come out. Fear not, I have not given up (yet). I have bee...
gcvis is a simple way of visualising the operation of the garbage collector within a Go process. Here is a screenshot of it in operation. The rest of this article explores how gcvis works and how to interpret its results.
Alex Clemmer is a computer programmer. Other programmers love Alex, excitedly describing him as "employed here" and "the boss's son".
While on vacation, I’ve been working on an alternate type inference scheme for rustc. (Actually, I got it 99% working on the plane, and have been slowly poking at it ever since.) This scheme simplifies the code of the type inferencer dramatically and (I think) helps to meet our intutions (as I will explain). It is…
Portal is a game that consists of a series of puzzles that must be solved by teleporting the player’s character and simple objects from one place to another.
Having just returned from the annual Oregon Programming Languages Summer School, at which I teach every year, I am once again very impressed with the impressive growth in the technical sophisticati…
Since the introduction of Swift, speed has been a key selling point. Indeed, it's right in the name of the language. It's said to be faster than dynamic languages like Python or JavaScript, potentially faster than Objective-C, and even claimed to be faster than C for certain cases. But how exactly does it do it?
Introduction Link to heading I just got home from JuliaCon, the first conference dedicated entirely to Julia. It was a great pleasure to spend two full days listening to talks about a language that I started advocating for just a little more than two years ago. What follows is a very brief review of the talks that…
I like Go. I use it for a number of things (including this blog, at the time of writing). Go is useful. With that said, Go is not a good language. It's not bad; it's just not good.
Erlang releases are a bit like magnets. Everyone who thinks about them shares the same thought: f**king releases, how do they work?
I’ve been inspired by the efforts of others (Chris Smith, Manuel Chakravarty) to try teaching children haskell as a first experience of programming. Haskell has a reputation of being a "…
It’s important for web experiences to work great on mobile devices. The latest release of the Dart includes a development version of Dar...
Warning: another technical post.I wrote this cover letter many years ago, when I wanted to get accepted to the Matzov unit of the Israeli Defense Force (in Israeli, every male is conscripted…
Web browsers do a lot of calculations on geometric coordinates, in many different coordinate systems and units of measurement. For example, a browser may need to translate a position expressed ...
