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1532

Trivia About Rust Types

Preface (by Jimmy Hartzell) I am a huge fan of Jon Gjengset’s Rust for Rustaceans, an excellent book to bridge the gap between beginner Rust programming skills and becoming a fully-functional member of the Rust community. He’s famous for his YouTube channel as well; I’ve heard good things about it (watching video…

1534

I Built a Ruby Parser

Sorry, this post will read like a “dear diary” entry rather than some life-changing HN-worthy guidance. Back in November 2020, almost on a whim I started work on a new parser for the Ruby programming language. It was almost exactly a year after I had started working on my compiler project (I hope to write a longer…

1535

Arc and Mutex in Rust

When writing concurrent Rust you will encounter Arc and Mutex types sooner or later. And although Mutex might already sound familiar as it's a concept known in many languages, chances are you haven't heard about Arc before Rust. What's more, you can't fully understand these concepts without tying them to the ownership…

1538

The First Lisp Compiler

This page examines the earliest surviving Lisp compiler, written by Timothy Hart and Michael Levin around 1961. To avoid repetition of phrases like “the compiler”, we will use the abbreviation “ HLC ” (for “Hart–Levin Compiler”) to refer to it. The HLC was introduced in M.I.T. AIM -039 and documented more fully in the…

1542

What Happened to Perl 7?

With Perl 5.36.0 just around the corner, we thought that this is a good time to clarify plans for the future of the Perl programming language. We realised that the future was hammered out in a number of steps, across several months. This meant that there hasn't been a single statement we could refer people to. This…

1547

Programming with Nothing

I love Ruby! I’ve used it every day for years and I’m not sick of it yet. It’s an easy language to love: it’s expressive, flexible and syntactically beautiful ; it has a unique combination of useful features like mixins , metaclasses and blocks ; it comes with a useful core library and comprehensive standard library …

1553

Rust: A Critical Retrospective

Since I was unable to travel for a couple of years during the pandemic, I decided to take my new-found time and really lean into Rust. After writing over 100k lines of Rust code, I think I am starting to get a feel for the language and like every cranky engineer I have developed opinions and because this is the…

1558

Golang Diaries: Generics

My coding time this year has been invested in Quamina , an event-filtering library implemented in Go. Just in the last couple of weeks I spotted an opportunity to bring Go’s shiny new generics to bear, and not just anywhere, but for a central data structure. I got good results, but the process was sort of painful; I…