Top posts

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

Programming Languages
Any year
1327

An incoherent Rust

Coherence and the orphan rules are a frequent source of complaints about Rust, and a common topic of language proposals. This post covers most of the existing proposals around coherence and my vision for how we should solve coherence once and for all.

1330

A Virtual Machine

Magicians protect their secrets not because the secrets are large and important, but because they are so small and trivial. The wonderful effects created on stage are often the result of a secret so absurd that the magician would be embarrassed to admit that that was how it was done.

1333

Why Lisp?

A lot of people ask us the question, why do we choose to use Common Lisp as our primary development language? Often times the question comes disguised as a suggestion: "Flask is a great webserver you should consider using". This is a well intentioned suggestion- of course we would like to use the best tools available!…

1341

Lisp: Icing or Cake?

The Spring Lisp Game Jam 2024 ended one week ago. 48 games were submitted, a new record for the jam! This past week has been a time for participants to play and rate each other’s games. As I explored the entries, I noticed two distinct meta-patterns in how people approached building games with Lisp. I think these…

1346

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…