Top posts

Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 21,843 posts.

Software Engineering
Any year
19666

New Programming Jargon

Every field comes up with its own jargon, and oftentimes subgroups within a field come up with their own specific words or phrases (those of you familiar with Microsoft Canada’s Developer and Platform Evangelism Team know that we have our own term for “broken”, named after one of our teammates who is notorious for…

19669

Tagged Pointer Strings

Tagged pointers are an interesting technology used to increase performance and reduce memory usage. As of OS X 10.10, NSString got the tagged pointer treatment, and today I'm going to take a look at how it works, a topic suggested by Ken Ferry.

19675

Rust's Object System

On the rust-dev mailing list, someone pointed out another “BitC retrospective” post by Jonathon Shapiro concerning typeclasses . The Rust object system provides interesting solutions to some of the problems he raises. We also manage to combine traditional class-oriented OOP with Haskell’s type classes in a way that…

19678

Cursed Linear Types in Rust

Inspired by Jack Wrenn’s post on Undroppable Types in Rust, I set out to see if it’s possible to create types that must be used exactly once. From my understanding, those things are called linear types, but don’t quote me on that1. Unless you are quoting the title of this article which explicitly says linear types… I…