Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 1,929 posts.
Happy 15th Birthday .NET
Today marks the 15th anniversary since .NET debuted to the world. On February 13th, 2002, the first version of .NET was released as part of Visual Studio.NET. It seems just like yesterday when Microsoft was building its “Next Generation Windows Services” and unleashed a new level of productivity with Visual…
A Picture of Java in 2020
This year Java hit an incredible milestone and reached the grand old age of 25 years. We celebrated its jubilee by running a special online Java day event, where lots of expert speakers shared their e
My Go executable files are still getting larger
The original draft of the analysis we presented was reviewed internally, and yet still inaccuracies slipped through. We are a team of humans. We make mistakes. We take full responsibility for the invalid conclusions we published.
Sorbet Compiler: An experimental, ahead-of-time compiler for Ruby
For the past year, the [Sorbet](https://sorbet.org/) team has been working on an experimental, ahead-of-time compiler for Ruby, powered by Sorbet and LLVM. Today we're sharing the source code for it. It lives alongside the existing code for Sorbet on GitHub, mostly in the `compiler/` folder:
PHP 8.2
PHP 8.2 is a major update of the PHP language. Readonly classes, null, false, and true as stand-alone types, deprecated dynamic properties, performance improvements and more
Replit now supports every programming language in Nix
At Replit, we want to give our users the most powerful, flexible, and easy-to-get-started coding environment. However, it has been limiting because we only support a fixed set of languages and OS packages, some of which are outdated. Ideally, users should be able to use any language and install any package with…
What Clojure Spec is and what you can do with it
This is the blog version of a talk I gave on the 2017-12-13 at the Athens Clojure Meetup, which was kindly hosted by Skroutz . The video of the talk is available (the talk was given in Greek, but there are English subtitles). This blog entry is not an exact transcript of the talk, I've added links and more information…
Pyston v2: Faster Python
We’re very excited to release Pyston v2, a faster and highly compatible implementation of the Python programming language. Version 2 is 20% faster than stock Python 3.8 on our macrobenchmarks…
The future of Java and OpenJDK updates without Oracle support
This post describes the furture support for Java and OpenJDK updates, now that Oracle has announced that soon it will no longer supply free binaries for JDK releases or write patches for bugs.
Figma’s Journey to TypeScript
Figma's team recently converted one of its codebases from a custom programming language to TypeScript without disrupting a single day of development.
Fear, trust and JavaScript: When types and functional programming fail
Explore the challenges and solutions when applying types and functional programming concepts in JavaScript. This insightful blog post delves into the complexities of managing data shape, immutability, and trust in dynamic code, offering practical advice and alternative approaches to enhance code reliability and…
Why Dart is not the language of the future.
The spec has even a chapter on factories (static constructors). (Oh my, factories? it's like 1997 and design patterns all over again!) I should note that the integration of popular design patterns at the syntax level is disappointing: design patterns tend to emerge to work around a language design's weaknesses…
ECMAScript 2016+ in Firefox
After the release of ECMAScript 2015, a.k.a. ES6, the ECMAScript Language Specification is evolving rapidly: it's getting many new features that will help developing web ...
Half a decade with Go
Happy 5th birthday, Go!
Will R Work on Apple Silicon?
At WWDC 2020 earlier this year, Apple announced a transition from Intel to ARM-based processors in their laptops. This blog is about the prospects of when R will work on that platform, based on experimentation on a developer machine running A12Z, one of the “Apple silicon” processors.
Usability Improvements in GCC 15
GCC 15 brings better error messages and diagnostics for your code, including prettier execution paths and easier-to-read compiler errors for C++ templates.
Clojure 1.7 is now available
We are pleased to announce the release of Clojure 1.7. The two headline features for 1.7 are transducers and reader conditionals. Also see the complete list ...
Erlang/OTP 26 Highlights
The official home of the Erlang Programming Language
From Rust to reality: The hidden journey of fetch_max
Tracing Rust AtomicU64::fetch_max from macro expansion and rustc intrinsics through LLVM atomicrmw umax down to the final x86-64 CAS loop.
The State of Async Rust: Runtimes
Recently, I found myself returning to a compelling series of blog posts titled Zero-cost futures in Rust by Aaron Turon about what would become the foundation of Rust’s async ecosystem and the Tokio runtime. This series stands as a cornerstone in wri…
PHP 5.4.0 released
PHP is a popular general-purpose scripting language that powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.