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Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 4,387 posts.

Systems & Performance
Any year
561

How Rust optimizes async/await

The issue to stabilize an initial version of async/await in Rust has left final comment period. The feature looks slated to stabilize in an upcoming release, most likely 1.39. This represents the culmination of an enormous amount of work by people all over the Rust community. But it’s also only the beginning of…

566

Popcount CPU instruction

Most CPU architectures in use today have an instruction called popcount , short for “population count”. Here’s what it does: it counts the number of set bits in a machine word. For example (assuming 8-bit words for simplicity), popcount(00100110) is 3 and popcount(01100000) is 2 .

570

Zero Cost Abstractions

The idea of a zero cost abstraction is very important to certain programming languages, like Rust and C++, which intend to enable users to write programs with excellent performance profiles with relatively little effort. Since this idea is fundamental to the design of Rust and my work, I want to investigate, for a…