Top posts

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

Programming Languages
Any year
2956

Multithreading in modern C++

With the new C++11 Standard, C++ faces the first time challenges of multicore architectures. The 2011 published standard defines how a C++ program has to behave in the presence of multiple threads. The C++11 multithreading capabilities are composed of two components. This is, on the one hand, the defined memory model…

2957

When the Compiler Bites

So far this year I’ve been bitten three times by compiler edge cases in GCC and Clang, each time catching me totally by surprise. Two were caused by historical artifacts, where an ambiguous specification lead to diverging implementations. The third was a compiler optimization being far more clever than I expected…

2966

Smalltalk-87

In late 1986 and early 1987 an ad hoc group of Smalltalk implementors got together to see if they could agree on a design for the next major version of Smalltalk, after Smalltalk-80. The intent was that what they agreed upon would feed into an IEEE standardization process. That process never got