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Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 5,634 posts.

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512

Racket is 25

posted by Matthias Felleisen and Matthew Flatt The First Thoughts [Matthias]: Wednesday 25 January 1995: POPL used to be a Monday-through-Wednesday-noon affair. Cormac Flanagan presented his future paper there (a static analysis on how to eliminate i...

524

Dear sir, you have built a compiler

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…

530

I Built a Lisp Compiler

I’m very proud to announce the completion of my first programming language compiler! Malcc is an incremental and ahead-of-time lisp compiler written in C. This is the story of my progress over the years and what I learned in the process. An alternate title for this post is: “How to Write a Compiler in Ten Years or…

538

Go Slices Are Fat Pointers

One of the frequent challenges in C is that pointers are nothing but a memory address. A callee who is passed a pointer doesn’t truly know anything other than the type of object being pointed at, which says some things about alignment and how that pointer can be used… maybe. If it’s a pointer to void ( void * ) then…