Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 21,833 posts.

Software Engineering
Any year
11240

On the Cleverness of Compilers

The “Sufficiently Clever Compiler” has become something of a trope in the Lisp community: the mythical beast that promises language and interface designers near-unlimited freedom, and leaves their output in a performance lurch by its non-appearance. A few years ago, I was young enough to join a research project to…