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Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,709 posts.

Programming Languages
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1741

How an Optimizing Compiler Works

Optimizing compilers are a mainstay of modern software: allowing a programmer to write code in a language that makes sense to them, while transforming it into a form that makes sense for the underlying hardware to run efficiently. The optimizing compiler's job is to figure out what your input program does, and create…

1749

Confession of a Haskell Hacker

I have a confession to make. I recently released two Haskell packages, lens-family-core and lens-family based on my previous blog post and Edward Kmett’s blog post . However, I never tested this code before releasing it. By “never tested”, I mean that I am pretty sure that I never once executed any of this code. I did…

1759

Scheme Is a Hoot

Lately I've been spending time learning Scheme and using it to implement the concepts I'm learning in my physics classes as time permits. One of the most exciting things I've been doing with this is getting my Scheme to compile to the Web thanks to Hoot. One of the biggest challenges has been the fact that Hoot is…

1765

A Boggling Return to C

My first real programming class, back in high school, was taught in C. I found it difficult and I remember spending the whole year thinking that I really had no aptitude for programming. I think I got an OK grade in the end, but I felt like I was really struggling compared to the other students in the class. It wasn’t…

1767

Async Rust in Three Parts

Async/await, or "async IO", is a new-ish ​ Rust added async/await in 2019. For comparison, C# added it in 2012, Python in 2015, JS in 2017, and C++ in 2020. language feature that lets our programs do more than one thing at a time. It's sort of an alternative to multithreading, though Rust programs often use both…