Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 21,842 posts.

Software Engineering
Any year
17202

Understanding Serde

Serde is one of the most popular Rust crates, and deservedly so. If you aren't familiar, Serde describes itself as "a framework for serializing and deserializing Rust data structures efficiently and generically." What is most impressive to me is how robust the Serde data model has proven to be, allowing it to support…

17209

Towards Crystal 1.0

Currently the main goal of the Crystal core team is to reach 1.0 in the near future. Since achieving that goal involves a number of non-obvious tradeoffs, we want to use this post to shed some light on those inherent tensions and how they drive our work and priorities for the next few releases.

17211

Fast Shadow Stacks for Go

tl;dr : Software shadow stacks could deliver up to 8x faster stack trace capturing in the Go runtime when compared to the frame pointer unwinding that landed in go1.21. This doesn’t mean that this idea should escape from the laboratory right away, but it offers a fun glimpse into a potential future of hardware…

17216

Quirks of Common Lisp Types

Humans have a tendency toward binary thinking (pardon the pun). If it's not A, it's B. Perhaps because Lisps have REPLs, they are often thought of from the outside as being dynamic, interpreted languages. Our years of Python have taught us that such languages don't really have strong typing - it's all a wild guess…