2011
Thoughts on porting NumPy to PyPy
Last weekend, I attended GitHub's PyCodeConf in Miami Florida and had the opportunity to give a talk on array-oriented computing and Python....
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 3,709 posts.
2012
I Built a Ruby Parser
Sorry, this post will read like a “dear diary” entry rather than some life-changing HN-worthy guidance. Back in November 2020, almost on a whim I started work on a new parser for the Ruby programming language. It was almost exactly a year after I had started working on my compiler project (I hope to write a longer…
2013
Shell Completions in Rust
If you've ever hit the tab key while typing commands in the shell, you are familiar with the value of shell completions. Bash has some default completion behavior, which is why you can type hel<TAB> and end up with help . It is also possible to add additional completion scripts which define the completion behavior for…
2014
A Tour of Go - Real examples of interfaces and concurrency
Last week, I gave a talk about Go at the Boston Google Developers Group meeting. There were some problems with the recording, so I have rerecorded the talk as a screencast and posted it on YouTube.
2015
2016
Stack traces in GHCi, coming in GHC 8.0.1
Bluesky: @simonmar.bsky.social Github: simonmar Email: marlowsd@gmail.com LinkedIn: Simon Marlow
2017
Go’ing Insane: Endless Error Handling
I’ve been using Go for a few years now, mostly in my open source project Lazygit. In my day job I use Ruby and Typescript, and I’ve also spent some time with Rust. Each of those languages have design quirks that can grind a developer’s gears, and although my own precious gears have been ground by every language I’ve…
2018
Just what does “code as data” mean anyway? (2014)
Recently, I’ve seen popular articles on macros and metaprogramming in Nimrod and Elixir . Both of these are wonderful metaprogramming systems, to be sure, but I couldn’t help but imagine some in the audience smirking inwardly – and occasionally less inwardly. What odd syntax! How out-of-place they are! If only there…
2019
2020
2021
Golang's big miss on memory arenas
When your software team needs to pick a language today, you typically weigh two factors: language performance and developer velocity.
2022
A response about dep and vgo
Peter Bourgon has a web site, and this is that web site.
2023
Why Lisp is now an acceptable scripting language
ASDF , the de facto standard build system for Common Lisp, has been vastly improved between 2009 and 2014. These and other improvements finally bring Common Lisp up to par with "scripting languages" in terms of ease of writing and deploying portable code that can access and "glue" together functionality from the…
2024
2025
Compile time evaluation in Nim, Zig, Rust and C++
Evaluating code at compile time is a capability that most, if not all, compiled programming languages possess, even if it can't be directly used by the programmer, but rather applied as an optimization. In this post, we'll explore a bit how to execute code at compile time in Nim, Zig, Rust and C++.
2026
A possible future of Python in the browser
My Python code was too slow, so I made it faster with Python. For some definition of “Python”.
2027
Donald Knuth used an Erlang-like notation
In this blogpost we'll see how Erlang's Syntax already appeared on TAOCP years before the language was even created.
2028
2029
It is ridiculously easy to refactor Go
I discovered a profound outcome of Go's support for static type checking and duck typing: It is ridiculously easy to refactor Go.
2030
2031
2032
Imperative Haskell
This post covers essentially the same material as a 5-minute presentation I gave at RC .
2033
Research in programming languages
Is there still research to be done in Programming Languages? This essay touches both on the topic of programming languages and on the nature of research work. I am mostly concerned in analyzing this question in the context of Academia, i.e. within the expectations of academic programs and research funding agencies…
2034
Suture – Supervisor Trees for Go
Supervisor trees are one of the core ingredients in Erlang's reliability and let it crash philosophy . A well-structured Erlang program is broken into multiple independent pieces that communicate via messages, and when a piece crashes, the supervisor of that piece automatically restarts it.
2035
Rust Ownership Explained with Python
Mostly software: Rust, machine learning, and P2P systems. Previously, games and cocktails.
2036
Building cross-platform Rust for Web, Android and iOS – a minimal example
Coding in Rust and others; making coding videos.
2037
2038
C++ Coroutines Do Not Spark Joy
C++20 added minimal support for coroutines. I think they’re done in a way that really doesn’t fit into C++, mostly because they don’t follow the zero-overhead principle. Calling a…
2039
2040
Whats New in PHP 8.2
PHP 8.2 has a new randomizer engine, readonly classes, disjunctive normal form types, redacted parameters, performance improvements, and more.