Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 399 posts.

Programming Languages
2021
97

Why Rust strings seem hard

Lately I’ve been seeing lots of anecdotes from people trying to get into Rust who get really hung up on strings (&str, String, and their relationship). Beyond Rust’s usual challenges around ownership, there can be an added layer of frustration because strings are so easy in the great majority of languages. You just…

99

Updating the Go Memory Model

The current Go language memory model was written in 2009, with minor updates since. It is clear that there are at least a few details that we should add to the current memory model, among them an explicit endorsement of race detectors and a clear statement of how the APIs in sync/atomic synchronize programs.

102

Crystal 1.1.0

We are releasing the first post-1.0 release, making efforts to keep our promise of making regular releases each 3 months, a bit delayed because of the conference, and with special focus on keeping the language stability. Below we list the most important or interesting changes, without mentioning the several bugfixes…

105

Goodbye C++, Hello C

Part 1 of this series about my toy renderer covers the most fundamental design decisions. Over the years, I have written many renderers and for a long time their complexity kept growing. This time, I took the opposite route. I wanted to maximize the fraction of code that implements crucial functionality rather than…