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Python 3.13 Gets a JIT
Reviewing the JIT in Python 3.13
Top posts
Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 246 posts.
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Go: What we got right, what we got wrong
This is my closing talk ( video ) from the GopherConAU conference in Sydney, given November 10, 2023, the 14th anniversary of Go being lau...
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The two factions of C++
The dream of a single dialect-free C++ has probably been dead for many years, anyway.
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The C23 edition of Modern C
The C23 edition of Modern C is now available for free download from And as before a dedicated page for the book may be found at where you also may find a link to download the code examples that com…
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93% of paint splatters are valid Perl programs (2019)
TLDR: read the paper and view the gallery of pretty Perl programs. In this paper, we aim to answer a long-standing open problem in the programming languages community: is it possible to smear paint on the wall without creating valid Perl?
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Pin
The Pin type (and the concept of pinning in general) is a foundational building block on which the rest of the the Rust async ecosystem stands. Unfortunately, it has also been one of the least accessible and most misunderstood elements of async Rust. This post is meant to explain what Pin achieves, how it came to be…
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I Created 175 Fonts Using Rust
How I used my own Rust tool to ship 175 quality pixel fonts.
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SICP: The only computer science book worth reading twice? (2010)
I was talking to one of my students earlier, and lent him a book to read over summer. It was only after he’d left that I realised that — for me at any rate — the book I’d given him is probably the most seminal work in the whole of computer science, and certainly the book that’s most influenced my career and research…
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Piet: Programming language in which programs look like abstract paintings (2002)
Piet is a programming language in which programs look like abstract paintings. The language is named after Piet Mondrian , who pioneered the field of geometric abstract art. I would have liked to call the language Mondrian, but someone beat me to it with a rather mundane-looking scripting language. Oh well, we can't…
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Ruby: A great language for shell scripts
It’s more than rails!
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Why Haskell?
Haskell is a great programming language with many features that make it easier to write robust software, and yet it is rarely taken up by software engineering teams. This essay aims to explain my views as to why Haskell is a great choice for programmers.
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Porting SBCL to the Nintendo Switch
For the past two years Charles Zhang and I have been working on getting my game engine, Trial, running on the Nintendo Switch. The primary challenge in doing this is porting the underlying Common Lisp runtime to work on this platform. We knew going into this that it was going to be hard, but it has proven to be quite…
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Java in the Small
Java has many features that make it well suited for large, long-lasting projects. But I find it surprisingly good for small tasks as well. Recent language features make it even better. The killer features are compile-time typing and great tool support.
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Everything you need to know about Python 3.13 – JIT and GIL went up the hill
All you need to know about the latest Python release including Global Interpreter Lock and Just-in-Time compilation.
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Writing a Rust compiler in C
To bootstrap Rust, no cost is too great.
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Dear sir, you have built a compiler (2022)
I am afraid to inform you that you have built a compiler. I know you wanted a “simple prototype” that would just add that one feature to your programming model. You said that “SSA is an overkill” and “it’s just way too much infrastructure to maintain for a simple task” and yet, six months later, you have pile of…
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Use Prolog to improve LLM's reasoning
On one side, LLMs show unseen capabilities in reasoning, but on the other - reasoning in LLMs is not ideal.
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Programming languages that blew my mind (2023)
I’ve been a programmer since the age of 8, and some kind of developer for most of my life. Throughout my life as a coder, both hobbyist and professional, I’ve learnt plenty of programming languages that felt like cookie-cutter clones of each other, but also a few programming languages that changed the way I looked at…
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Rewriting Rust
The Rust programming language feels like a first generation product. You know what I mean. Like the first iPhone - which was amazing by the way. They made an entire operating system around multitouch. A smart phone with no keyboard. And a working web browser. Within a few months, we
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Why "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" matters (2011)
In 2011, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of MIT, the Boston Globe made a list of the most important innovations developed there. They asked me to explain the importance of SICP, and this is what I sent them:
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A Tour of the Lisps
2023 seems to have been the year where I "made the rounds" of a number of major Lisps. There were several elements that lead to this. Firstly must have been my exposure to Elixir in 2022, which introduced me to the idea of debugging live systems and "staying in your program". Secondly must have been my chief complaint…
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The beautiful dissociation of the Japanese language
An extra dimension that you can play with
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A comparison of Rust’s borrow checker to the one in C#
OK, so C# doesn’t share the Rust concept of “borrowing,” so it wouldn’t technically be correct to call this “borrow checking,” but in practice when people talk about “Rust’s borrow checker” they’re talking about all of the static analysis Rust does to ensure memory safety, for which I think this qualifies.
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I have no constructor, and I must initialize
It has been three days. The room is cold and dark, but your screens are blinding. You feel disoriented as you come in and out of dissociative episodes. Now and again, you laugh, to no accompaniment. Why are you here? Was this your fault?
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Lua is so underrated
Introduction The more I learn about Lua's design and implementation, the more impressed I am. It's very rare to see software that does so much with so lit...
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Hyrum’s Law in Golang
Occurrence of Hyrum's law in Golang
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scrapscript.py
Scrapscript is a small, pure, functional, content-addressable, network-first programming language. It’s designed to allow creating small, simply shareable programs. The language was created by Taylor Troesh and the main implementation was created by me and Chris.