Every blog post that took off on Hacker News, ranked by the votes of its best submission. 233 posts.
Forth is uncommonly used to teach programming to kids. Scripting languages like Python and visual environments like Scratch are far more popular options. But when I got the opportunity to introduce middle and high school students to programming, I chose the stack-oriented concatenative language from 1970. I was…
How Go 1.20's WithCancelCause and Go 1.21's WithTimeoutCause let you attach a reason to context cancellation, plus a gotcha with manual cancel and the stdlib pattern that covers every path.
QBE 1.3 took a while to cook, but it is the most significant release since 1.0 with around 7k new lines of code and 1.5k deleted ones. In addition to the usual bug fixes, QBE gained a new and original IL matching algorithm, new optimizations from Roland Paterson-Jones, Scott Graham added support for the Windows ABI…
Introduction to Lisp programming on a PDP-1, with a hands-on practical focus
The Nim Team is happy to announce the next instalment of NimConf! NimConf 2026 will happen June 20, 2026 in the traditional online format where the talks are pre-recorded and revealed as premiers on YouTube while the viewers can ask questions and the presenter can answer them in the live chat.
This is shorter than some of my other posts, but I keep seeing people doing this wrong. It's even worse now in the LLM era.
Crystal is a compiled programming langauge with static type-checking with syntax very similar to the Ruby programming language . Something that keeps Crystal feeling like a dynamically typed language is how a variable can be assigned to multiple types throughout the course of its lifetime, unlike most statically typed…
A collection of examples of how to use Common Lisp
And lived to tell the tale.
I’ve been telling people for the last 25 years that Jane Street as an organization was just not interested in formal methods.
If you are an Emacs user with a keen eye, you will have noticed that in Emacs Lisp, code is data. After all, 'Lisp' is shorthand for 'List Processing'. One of E...
Atwood's Law predicted JavaScript's dominance through accessibility. A new corollary is emerging: system languages will win through operational efficiency and AI-assisted development.
Improve startup and warmup time by making optimized native code for an application instantly available when the HotSpot Java Virtual Machine starts. Achieve this by compiling application code to native code in a training run, storing the native code in the AOT cache for use in subsequent production runs. If the…
this has been bothering me for a while now, so I want to write down my thoughts so I can get it out of my head and move on. we’re gonna talk about how Deno approaches security, specifically with its permissions system, and why I think this approach is fundamentally insecure and misleading.
The Nix language lacks a good type system . There are already several configuration languages that provide static and even gradual typing (see, e.g., Cue , Dhall , or Nickel ), but none offer the ability to easily annotate legacy Nix code with types.
Today we are excited to announce the Release Candidate (RC) of TypeScript 6.0! To get started using the RC, you can get it through npm with the following
I once wrote a Perl subroutine that would memoize the subroutine that called it. That much was useful, but then it inserted a copy of itself into the caller, so that its callers would be memoized too. A well-placed call to aggressively_memoize could back-propagate to the whole codebase, spreading functional purity…
When the address of a nested function is taken, GCC creates at trampoline at run-time. This trampoline is placed on the stack, which means that the stack has to be executable. This is problematic because a non-executable stack is an important security feature. For some time now, GCC has the option to place the…
Define a simple, standard API for parsing and generating JSON documents so that doing so does not require an external library. Enable many JSON processing tasks to be accomplished with little coding. This is an incubating API .
Why 'indirection has a cost' is usually the wrong reason to inline and what actually costs you.
We've launched an experimental Rust library for Tailscale via tsnet. Help test tailscale-rs and shape it with your feedback.
In the previous article we explored how the Go runtime bootstraps itself — how a Go binary goes from the operating system handing it control to your func main() running. During that bootstrap, one of the first things the runtime sets up is the memory allocator. And that’s what we’re going to explore today. Think of…
These are questions about C++ Style and Technique that people ask me often. If you have better questions or comments on the answers, feel free to email me (bs at cs dot tamu dot edu). Please remember that I can't spend all of my time improving my homepages.
