The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 5,634 posts.
When people say Rust is a “safe language”, they often mean memory safety. And while memory safety is a great start, it’s far from all it takes to build robust applications. Memory safety is necessary but not sufficient for overall reliability. In thi…
A blog about computers, functional languages, Lisp, and Scheme.
Since the early days of automatic computing we have had people that have felt it as a shortcoming that programming required the care and accuracy that is characteristic for the use of any formal symbolism. They blamed the mechanical slave for its strict obedience with which it carried out its given instructions, even…
If someone had told me a few months ago I’d be playing with .NET again after a 15+ years hiatus I probably would have laughed at this.1 Early on in my career I played with .NET and Java, and even though .NET had done some things better than Java (as it had the opportunity to learn from some early Java mistakes), I…
Issue warnings about uses of deep reflection to mutate final fields. These warnings aim to prepare developers for a future release that ensures integrity by default by restricting final field mutation, which will make Java programs safer and potentially faster. Application developers can avoid both current warnings…
Some good news is coming in Rust 1.86
Today we’re delighted to introduce the first stable release of swiftly, a Swift version manager that takes the pain out of installing, managing and updating your Swift toolchain.
I announce Xee, the implementation of XPath and XSLT in Rust that I've been working on for the last two years.
This new edition has been the occasion to overhaul the presentation in many places, but its main purpose is the update to the new C standard, C23 . The goal was to publish this new edition of Modern C at the same time as the new C standard goes through the procedure of ISO publication. The closest approximation of the…
Go 1.25 simplifies the language spec by removing the notion of core types
A case study of how Elixir is being used at Cyanview.
In this post, I talk about my favorite C/C++ pattern involving macros.
The C++ standard library (also know as the STL) is, without a doubt, an astounding piece of work. Its scope, performance and incredible back...
There is always ongoing discussion about the future direction of the Scala language. How fast should it move? What needs to be improved? Should the language change at all? This article discusses how Scala must keep evolving , why that evolution is necessary, and what directions we expect that evolution to take. We…
This story is about concurrent data structures in the context of Ruby. The goal here is to demonstrate how true parallelism can be achieved with global mutable state (which at the time of writing, is not supported by built-in Ruby primitives).
Types in coding projects are good. Don’t be afraid to create them when you need to.
After the Graz, Austria February 2025 WG14 Meeting, I am now confident in the final status of the defer TS, and it is now time.
Welcome to kmx.io
Embarking on a native port of the existing TypeScript compiler and toolset to achieve a 10x performance speed-up.
A deep dive into the performance of Python 3.14's tail-call interpreter: How the performance results were confounded by an LLVM regression, the surprising complexity of compiling interpreter loops, and some reflections on performance work, software engineering, and optimizing compilers.
This post describes how to compile a single C++ source file to an object file with the Clang API. Here is the code. It behaves like a simplified clang executable that handles -c and -S…
News post: Gleam v1.9.0 released
9 months ago, I took a gander at PG’s guide to Bel . If you haven’t read it, here’s the premise:
Karl Seguin's Blog - A mix of coding and creative writing
TL;DR ¶ Some of the wisdom contained in Josh Bloch’s Effective Java book is relevant to Go. panic and recover are best reserved for exceptional circumstances. Reliance on panic and recover can noticeably slow down execution, incurs heap allocations, and precludes inlining. Internal handling of failure cases via panic…
Introducing Python interpreter embedded in Elixir and a Fine way to write your NIFs.
My Python code was too slow, so I made it faster with Python. For some definition of “Python”.
I recently took some time to try Gleam, the type-safe language that runs on the Erlang virtual machine. For a couple of weeks, I used it to build a little feed aggregator. These are my notes.
First part of a series of articles about writing a .NET Garbage Collector in C# using NativeAOT. This part sets the expectations and setups the project, dealing with the first difficulties.
