The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 327 posts.
I just finished reading the paper Borrow checking Hylo . It outlines the basic design of Hylo . Hylo is an early-stage programming language, but unlike other contenders of C++, it provides memory safety like rust. Specifically it merges rust’s borrow checking ideas into the framework of moveable value semantics (MVS)…
Inspired by Jack Wrenn’s post on Undroppable Types in Rust, I set out to see if it’s possible to create types that must be used exactly once. From my understanding, those things are called linear types, but don’t quote me on that1. Unless you are quoting the title of this article which explicitly says linear types… I…
I wrote a book. It’s called Janet for Mortals, and it’s free, and it’s on the internet, and you can read it right now. And you should read it right now, instead of reading this blog post, because this blog post is not very interesting if you haven’t read the book. Heck, this blog post is not very interesting even if…
The dream of a single dialect-free C++ has probably been dead for many years, anyway.
Whether you have to do with data in the form of CSV, JSON or a full-blooded programming language like C, JavaScript, Scala, or maybe a query language like SQL, you always transform some sequence of characters (or binary values) into a structured representation. Whatever you’ll do with that representation depends on…
Update : I forgot that I did a brief analysis on this many years ago, using ROT13 as example.
PHP 8.4 is a major update of the PHP language. It contains many new features, such as property hooks, asymmetric visibility, an updated DOM API, performance improvements, bug fixes, and general cleanup.
Occurrence of Hyrum's law in Golang
I meant to write about this when I started my blog in 2009. Eventually Lush kind of faded out of my consciousness, as it was a lot easier to get work doing stuff in R or Matlab or whatever. The guy…
I am afraid to inform you that you have built a compiler. I know you wanted a “simple prototype” that would just add that one feature to your programming model. You said that “SSA is an overkill” and “it’s just way too much infrastructure to maintain for a simple task” and yet, six months later, you have pile of…
OCaml's let … = … in … is very confusing. When nested, you can't tell how it's nested.
How we scrape callstack information from the LuaJIT engine for profiling
An expose on Implicits and Local Coherence
Freedom is nothing without constraints, and Go’s generics gives us a powerful way to build polymorphic types and functions constrained by type sets . Let’s geek out.
I started learning Rust about 3 or 4 years ago. I am now knee-deep in several very complex Rust projects that keep slamming into the limitations of the Rust compiler. One of the most common and obnoxious problems is hitting a situation the borrow-checker can’t deal with and realizing that I need to completely…
I was talking to one of my students earlier, and lent him a book to read over summer. It was only after he’d left that I realised that — for me at any rate — the book I’d given him is probably the most seminal work in the whole of computer science, and certainly the book that’s most influenced my career and research…
Junctions, whatevers, hypers, and more!
Rust is my favorite programming language. I've been writing Rust for about 6 years, from college to professionally, and I'm vocal about how helpful the compi...
Macros, iterators, patterns, error handling and match make Rust almost perfect
Incomplete data structures challenge our notion of mutability
Three months ago, I wrote about why you might want to use panics for error handling. Even though it’s a catchy title, panics are hardly suited for this goal, even if you try to hack around with macros and libraries. The real star is the unwinding mechanism, which powers panics. This post is the first in a series…
Python 3.13 is out and it's time to run some benchmarks to see how well it performs with the new free-threaded mode.
A look at some unfriendly Zig syntax
I’ve been a programmer since the age of 8, and some kind of developer for most of my life. Throughout my life as a coder, both hobbyist and professional, I’ve learnt plenty of programming languages that felt like cookie-cutter clones of each other, but also a few programming languages that changed the way I looked at…
I have written about my on-going rewrite-it-to-Rust effort at work: 1 , 2 , 3 . And now it's finished, meaning it's 100% Rust and 0% C++ - the public C API has not changed, just the implementation, one function at time until the end. Let's have a look back at what worked, what didn't, and what can be done about it.
A great language strangled by governance
In the 1950s, computers did not really interoperate. ARPANET has not yet happened (that would become a thing in the 60s), and every operating system was typically tied to the hardware that was meant to run on. Most communication actually happened over telephone, and no company was more present in that space than the…
What Ruby’s top-level methods actually are, who they belong to and how they are namespaced
OK, so C# doesn’t share the Rust concept of “borrowing,” so it wouldn’t technically be correct to call this “borrow checking,” but in practice when people talk about “Rust’s borrow checker” they’re talking about all of the static analysis Rust does to ensure memory safety, for which I think this qualifies.
