Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,709 posts.
To learn Rust, I implemented an audio game. There were some things I liked and some things I didn't. Some things were easy and some were hard. And there were plenty of libraries that were a joy to use.
People who write Ruby programs want to use metaprogramming. It’s part of what makes the language what it is. But in existing implementations of Ruby, metaprogramming is slow. My work focused on making it fast, providing fast tooling for Ruby programmers, and fast support for legacy C extensions.
Checked exceptions have always been a controversial feature of the Java language.
I must admit that some previous years for C++ might feel a bit “boring” and “stable”. New features, new standard every three years, meetings, conferences… life as usual (apart from some additional World/Economy/public Health events…). This year seems different as it looks like a “breakpoint” in the history of C++… and…
Recently, we had a discussion in our team about undefined behaviour (UB) in C. For those unfamiliar: We say that a program has undefined behaviour when we write code where the language specification doesn't define what should happen during execution. That means compilers can do whatever they like if they encounter…
Today I mourn. What am I mourning? Encapsulation. At least in my projects. As a library author, I’ve decided to avoid private class fields from now on and gradually refactor them out of my existing libraries. Why did I make such a drastic decision? It all started a few days ago, when I was building a Vue 3 app that…
Designing a language, types first
Fifteen years ago Python’s GIL wasn’t a big issue. Concurrency was something dismissed as probably unnecessary. What people really was needed was a faster interpreter, after all, who had more than one CPU? But, slowly, as the requirement for concurrency increased, the problems with the GIL increased.
I've been using Elm since about one year back now. At the start of 2021 I began working with a client that had an existing Elm frontend code base and an early stage backend built in Elixir and Phoenix. This post will be about my experiences running face first into Elm. I'll be vague on some details as I can't share…
This is a short response to the recently announced Go 2 generics draft proposals
Many people, including myself, have implemented garbage collection (GC)libraries for Rust. Manish Goregaokar wrote up a fantastic survey of thisspace a few y...
Ever wondered how Clojure's persistent vector actually works? This is part 1 of a blog series which aims to explain them.
Martin Uecker, 2025-08-10 I discuss the implementation of type and bounds safe generic containers in C. Previously, I discussed a span type , bounds checking using arrays . and a a vector type . This time, I will discuss maybe inspired by Haskell. This type can used to return a value that may not exist, e.g. because…
I’ve been thinking about garbage collection in Rust for a long time, ever since I started working on Servo’s JS layer. I’ve designed a GC library, …
Imagine someone let you into an alien spaceship they landed in your backyard, sat you at the controls, and encouraged you to fly the ship...
Macros are required to do some very helpful things in Rust, but this isn't an article about any of those things.
Sometimes we start things but decide midway through that we would prefer to rather not be doing them. That process is sometimes referred to as cancellation. Say we accidentally clicked "download" on a large file in the browser. We should have a way to tell the computer to stop downloading 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…
Overture to our small Lisp to x86-64 compiler
A new year is upon us. Before the world ends, let’s take a look back at what 2011 meant for everybody’s favorite programming language:
If you’ve ever needed to hit a breakpoint programmatically in C++, you’ve probably written something like this: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 #if defined(_MSC_VER) __debugbreak(); #elif defined(__clang__) __builtin_debugtrap(); #elif defined(__GNUC__) && (defined(__i386__) || defined(__x86_64__)) __asm__ volatile("int3"); #else…
A brief overview of our study of abstract-syntax-tree and bytecode interpreters on top of RPython and the GraalVM metacompilation systems.
Michael Snoyman's personal homepage and blog, featuring writing about programming, open source, health, finance, religion, and whatever else catches his interest.
We’ve learned the basics of Clojure’s syntax and evaluation model . Now we’ll take a tour of the basic nouns in the language.
