Topics /
The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 3,707 posts.
After ~7 years, I was done with Clojure . I was writing a some CLI apps , and I hated how long they took to start up. The community at large seemed not to care about this problem, except for the babashka folks. However, I spent long, hard hours banging my head against native-image and it just wasn't working out. It…
Compilers, interpreters, runtimes, and the like can sometimes feel vaguely magical. They take your code, perform complex transformations that you only partially understand, and spit out an executable binary. Clearly, the inner workings of such a beast must contain arcane secrets, not meant for the minds of mortals.
The perspective of an ignorant computer science undergrad
Replace conditionals with lambdas for simpler code that's more powerful
I'm Yasser and I've made it my mission to produce an alternative to LLVM, the current king of compiler backend libraries. I'm calling it Tilde (or TB for tilde backend) and the reasons are pretty simple, i believe it's far too slow at compiling and far too big to be fixed from the inside. It's been 20 years and cruft…
I wrote Gitlet to show how Git works under the covers. I wrote it to be readable. I commented the code heavily.
Title is literally true. This may not be the best place to learn about these concepts for the first time, because I'm going to focus on knocking down the misconceptions about them.
2023 seems to have been the year where I "made the rounds" of a number of major Lisps. There were several elements that lead to this. Firstly must have been my exposure to Elixir in 2022, which introduced me to the idea of debugging live systems and "staying in your program". Secondly must have been my chief complaint…
For work-related reasons, I had to recently get up to speed on programming in Haskell. Before that, I had very little actual experience with the language, clocking probably at less than a thousand lines of working code over a couple of years. Nothing impressive either: some wrapper script here, some experimental…
Obviously this is an utterly preposterous statement: it’s hard to think of a more ridiculous and esoteric coding requirement. I can just imagine all sorts of amusing conversations with designers and business sponsors: “No... the size of this <input> field should be 23... 24 is just too long!” Or: “We need to explain…
A Guide to comparing Claude Code Compiler with GCC
As devs in late 2018, we’ve got lots of programming language choices. Mainstream ones alone, there’s about a dozen or so of them. They’re all awesome. As you wander a bit further down the obscurity path, you’ll find languages like elm , elixir , purescript , and reason . And just past those, you’ll find nim .
One of the most remarkable things about the julia programming language, is how well the packages compose. You can almost always reuse someone else’s types or methods in your own software without issues. This is generally taken on a high level to be true of all programming languages because that is what a library is…
I am afraid to inform you that you have built a compiler. I know you wanted a “simple prototype” that would just add that one feature to your programming model. You said that “SSA is an overkill” and “it’s just way too much infrastructure to maintain for a simple task” and yet, six months later, you have pile of…
Algebraic Structures are something I wish I’d understood better, sooner. I had a hazy idea of what they were, but didn’t know the correct terminology. That was a massive barrier to finding out more. This article is my attempt to stop that happening to others. We’ll look at: What are algebraic structures? How do we use…
Mike Kohn's music, software, and electronics projects.
I’m very proud to announce the completion of my first programming language compiler! Malcc is an incremental and ahead-of-time lisp compiler written in C. This is the story of my progress over the years and what I learned in the process. An alternate title for this post is: “How to Write a Compiler in Ten Years or…
You will often hear it said that JavaScript is a ‘functional’ programming language. It is described as such simply because functions are first-class values: many other features that define functional programming – immutable data, preference for recursion over looping, algebraic type systems, avoidance of side effects…
This book, written by Protesilaos Stavrou, also known as ‘Prot’, provides a big picture view of the Emacs Lisp programming language.
I’ve been spending a bit of my time playing around with new languages — in particular, Rust has captured my imagination. The bulk of the…
This is an announcement regarding the resolution of the syntax for the await operator in Rust. This is one of the last major unresolved questions blocking the stabilization of the async/await feature, a feature which will enable many more people to write non-blocking network services in Rust. This post contains…
One of the frequent challenges in C is that pointers are nothing but a memory address. A callee who is passed a pointer doesn’t truly know anything other than the type of object being pointed at, which says some things about alignment and how that pointer can be used… maybe. If it’s a pointer to void ( void * ) then…
I have changed my mind about some topics big and small so far in my life. Today: the value of types for programming.
An extra dimension that you can play with
A 12 day Advent of Code year convinced me Gleam is the real deal, thanks to Rust-like errors, great pipes, and surprisingly ergonomic FP.
