1981
Needed 1+1, built a functional programming language
A deep dive into converting a simple arithmetic expression into a binary tree, leading to a custom language in C.
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,709 posts.
1982
1983
Golang Object Oriented Design
Composition not inheritance, polymorphism through interfaces, and packages for namespacing.
1984
Shrink Go binaries 7x with this one weird trick
Ok, I lied, there’s no weird trick. However, you can easily reduce a Go binary size by more than 6 times with some flags and common tools.
1985
Java Is Unsound: The Industry Perspective
Discussing a recent academic finding on Java and Scala, from industry's perspective.
1986
The Problem with Macros
So we’re supposed to be writing a game, right? But in order to make progress, we have to fix a bug. And in order to fix the bug, we have to write a test. And in order to write a test, we have to write a test framework. And in order to write a test framework, we have to understand a thing or two about macros. Okay. So…
1987
Things I like about Gleam's Syntax
Gleam is a Type-Safe programming language that transpiles to Erlang And javascript . , so you can run its code on the BEAM. I’ve slept on Gleam for a while because its syntax. It was too much Rust and not enough Elixir for me.
1988
PEG Parsers
Some years ago someone asked whether it would make sense to switch Python to a PEG parser. (Or a PEG grammar; I don’t recall exactly what…
1989
Architecture of a Real World Haskell Application
There were numerous posts on reddit, SO and the like which were asking for how to architect real world Haskell applications. Well, this is my go at it for an in-house testing tool which is used extensively. I would not claim myself an advanced Haskeller, some of the code is probably not idiomatic Haskell (and also…
1990
Lush: My favorite small programming language
I meant to write about this when I started my blog in 2009. Eventually Lush kind of faded out of my consciousness, as it was a lot easier to get work doing stuff in R or Matlab or whatever. The guy…
1991
Extending Rust's Effect System
This is the transcript of my RustConf 2023 talk: "Extending Rust's Effect System", presented on September 13th 2023 in Albuquerque, New Mexico and streamed online.
1992
1993
The Reliability of Go
As part of the Canonical Cloud Sprint taking place in San Francisco last week I attended Dave Cheney's talk at the GoSF meetup on the...
1994
Linus Torvalds on aliasing
See also Dennis Ritchie on aliasing, PLOS article , pointer alias in C and remarks on the purpose of C.
1995
Python's Type Checking Renaissance
You may have heard that TypeScript has been taking the web development space by storm in the last few years , bringing to it static types. I believe the same thing is starting to happen in the world of Python, where type checkers like mypy , Pyre , and Pyright are increasingly used, at least where Python is used by…
1996
The cost of Go's panic and recover
TL;DR ¶ Some of the wisdom contained in Josh Bloch’s Effective Java book is relevant to Go. panic and recover are best reserved for exceptional circumstances. Reliance on panic and recover can noticeably slow down execution, incurs heap allocations, and precludes inlining. Internal handling of failure cases via panic…
1997
strcpy: A niche function you don't need
The C strcpy function is a common sight in typical C programs. It’s also a source of buffer overflow defects, so linters and code reviewers commonly recommend alternatives such as strncpy (difficult to use correctly; mismatched semantics), strlcpy (non-standard, flawed ), or C11’s optional strcpy_s ( no correct or…
1998
Why Elixir (2014)
It’s been about a year since I’ve started using Elixir. Originally, I intended to use the language only for blogging purposes, thinking it could help me better illustrate benefits of Erlang Virtual Machine (EVM). However, I was immediately fascinated with what the language brings to the table, and very quickly…
1999
The Strict Aliasing Situation Is Pretty Bad
One thing that works well in practice in cases where you really don’t want to process single bytes at a time is to use a union for going from one type to another. Granted, writing one member of a union and reading from a different one also isn’t allowed per the standard, but every compiler I’ve come across allows it…
2000
2001
Turbo Pascal: A Great Choice for Programming Under CP/M (2013)
CP/M was blessed with many programming languages, each with their own strengths and weaknesses. I think that Turbo Pascal stands out from these and I'm not alon
2002
Modern garbage collection: Part 2
A look at what the newest generation of Java GCs can do
2003
2004
2005
Where Rust really shines
Yesterday I was working on a small feature for the Rust compiler, and came across a situation which really showcased Rust’s awesomeness as a language …
2006
2007
2008
2009
Beginner's guide to error handling in Rust
Easy to follow guide using practical examples
2010
Little Languages
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