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Zig Is Self-Hosted Now, What's Next?
Why self-host Zig?<br> For great justice, of course… and also a few more reasons actually.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,707 posts.
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PHP in 2022
A blog about modern PHP, the web, and programming in general. Follow my newsletter and YouTube channel as well.
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The string type is broken
My previous article, “We don’t need a string type“, caused a bit of stir. Though the feedback is mixed, there is a common theme of a string being a useful feature. After doing a bit more research I can determine only one thing: most current string types are broken! Many of us believe our strings […]
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C Macro Reflection in Zig
Zig’s reflection combined with Zig’s ability to import C header files means Zig can be used for C macro reflection.
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Thoughts on Python 3
My current thoughts on the state of Python 3 and where it’s heading.
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The Zen of Erlang
This is a loose transcript (or long paraphrasing?) of a presentation given at ConnectDev'16, a conference organized by Genetec in which I was invited to speak.
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Some thoughts on asynchronous Python API design in a post-async/await world
I've recently been exploring the exciting new world of asynchronous I/O libraries in Python 3 – specifically asyncio and curio . These two libraries make some different design choices. This is an essay that I wrote to try to explain to myself what those differences are and why I think they matter, and distill some…
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TypeScript is surprisingly ok for compilers
There are two main historical trends when choosing an implementation language for something compiler-shaped.
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Cognition: A new antisyntax language redefining metaprogramming
Other languages are inflexible and broken. Let's fix that.
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Clojure on the Desktop
With cljfx and Java 14 it’s finally here
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What's Next for Scala
A recent tweet by a friend of mine noted how the public interest in the Scala programming language seems to have plateaued or waned, which matches my feeling of the latest trends and zeitgeist. This blog post will go into why I think that has happened, where Scala stands now, and what the future holds for the Scala…
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Ruby 2.6
Christmas is around the corner, but I couldn’t wait and I have already been trying the new Ruby release! :christmas_tree: :tada: Ruby 2.6, apart from efficie...
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The lost language extensions of MetaWare's High C compiler (2023)
This book I got in a pile of FM TOWNS books turns out to be a lot more interesting that I was expecting an '80s C compiler manual to be. For as long as C and its relatives have been in mainstream use,…
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How Rust is tested
Rust is a systems programming language with massive ambitions. It is designed for creating the most reliable software, from the tiniest embedded systems to multi-million line behemoths, and its users need to have confidence that it is fit for purpose.
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The myth of using Scala as a better Java
When people talk about their experience with Scala, they often say that it is possible to use Scala as a better Java. And indeed, many companies, especially the ones that adopted Scala around 2008-2009, didn't want to give up the familiar tooling and simply integrated Scala into existing workflows based on Maven. At…
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Python’s Weak Performance Matters
Here is an argument I used to make, but now disagree with: Just to add another perspective, I find many “performance” problems in the real world can often be attributed to factors other…
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Go Creeping In
I’ve seen the inside of the Google and Amazon tech stacks. There are common threads that run through them and also, I bet, through most BigTechCos. Here and there down the stack is a lot of C++ and vestigial remnants from earlier days, Perl or PHP or whatever. Out in front of humans, of course, JS. But in between…
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Why is my Rust build so slow?
I’ve recently come back to an older project of mine (that powers this website), and as I did some maintenance work: upgrade to newer crates, upgrade to a newer rustc, I noticed that my build was ta...
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Go 1.16 will make system calls through Libc on OpenBSD
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Microfeatures I'd like to see in more languages
There are roughly three classes of language features: Features that the language is effectively designed around, such that you can't add it after the fact....
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Using Rust at a startup: A cautionary tale
Rust is awesome, for certain things. But think twice before picking it up for a startup that needs to move fast.
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V Language Review
V is a programming language promising to be “Simple, fast, safe, compiled. For developing maintainable software.” V has a controversial past but what is the state of V in 2022?
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Rewrite Everything in Rust
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
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I spent a year making an ASN.1 compiler in D
In this post I’ll just rambling about ASN.1; parts of the compiler implementation, and some of the tool’s output rather than the tool itself as its still too WIP to really advertise on its own yet.
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Speeding up Ruby by rewriting C in Ruby
There is a recent language comparison repo which has been getting shared a lot. In it, CRuby was the third slowest option, only beating out R and Python. The repo author, @BenjDicken, created a fun visualization of each language’s performance. Here’s one of the visualizations, which shows Ruby as the third slowest…
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State Machines in Rust
Every now and then I like to think about topics that don't directly relate to my daily work. One of those topics has been parsers: back in January I wrote about byte-ordered stream parsing and how I think we can improve streaming parsing in Rust with a small set of API additions.