Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 21,827 posts.

Software Engineering
Any year
8202

Windows 3.1 All Over Again

Reactive programming and thread sharing. Javascript, Node.js, Go, Rails, Elixir and Erlang. Rewind the clocks to Windows 3.1 In 1992 with Windows 3.1 we had this thing non-preemptive multitasking, i.e. “Cooperative Multitasking”. Cooperation is a funny term, it should actually be “Programmer Controlled Multitasking”…

8204

Think in math, write in code (2019)

Programmers love to discuss programming languages. We not only debate their technical merits and aesthetic qualities, but they become integrated into our personal identities, along with the values and traits that we associate with them. Some even defend a form of Linguistic Determinism that thinking is confined to…

8208

On mutex performance and WTF::Lock

One of the things I’ve been doing this quarter is removing Gecko’s dependence on NSPR locks . Gecko’s (non-recursive) mutexes and condition variables now use platform-specific constructs, rather than indirecting through NSPR. This change makes things smaller, especially on POSIX platforms, and uses no dynamic memory…

8214

GCC 5.1 released

Command-line optimization and target options are now streamed on a per-function basis and honored by the link-time optimizer. This change makes link-time optimization a more transparent replacement of per-file optimizations. It is now possible to build projects that require different optimization settings for…