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The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 3,709 posts.
While browsing Reddit the other day waiting for my code to compile, I ran across this question on r/Python: is hash(-1) == hash(-2) an easter egg? Wait, is that really true? $ python Python 3.9.6 (default, Jun 29 2021, 00:00:00) [GCC 11.1.1 20210531 (Red Hat 11.1.1-3)] on linux Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or…
Haskell’s State monad has a shameful secret. It’s not a monad [ State monads don’t respect the monad laws in Haskell, Simon Marlow ] . Look:
I try to not read HN/Reddit too much about Pyston, since while there are certainly some smart and reasonable people on there, there also seem to be quite a few people with axes to grind (*cough cou…
Briefly put, types in L-world are ambiguous, leading to unhygienic mixtures of value operations with reference operations, and uncontrolled pollution from null s infecting value code.
Usually in C identifiers are not directly followed by strings. But when U prefixed literals were introduced in C. there still were some rare clashes with existing code. This happened were a macro U…
I often write pieces that showcase how well Rust can work for you, and how it can let you build powerful abstractions, and prevents you from making a bunch of mistakes. If you read something like S...
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…
Hi 👋 you're reading a pretty old post! I started writing on here back in high school and this page may not reflect my current views. Recommend checking out related articles and categories down below, I've likely published more recent thoughts on this topic.
Three months ago, I wrote about why you might want to use panics for error handling. Even though it’s a catchy title, panics are hardly suited for this goal, even if you try to hack around with macros and libraries. The real star is the unwinding mechanism, which powers panics. This post is the first in a series…
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Arrays in Rust are fixed size, and Rust requires that every element in an array is initialized to a valid value when the array is initialized. The result of these requirements is array initialization in Rust is a much deeper topic than it would seem.
In this post, we implement a garbage collector that frees memory no longer used by the executables our compiler creates.
Dr. Martin Odersky, the lead designer/developer of the Scala Programming Language , Generic Java, and Pizza requires no introduction, but the motivation for this micro-interview does. That is, there is an unfortunate view in some circles that sees the existence of Scala and Clojure as somehow being at odds. In…
Lately I've had an urge to start playing a few games again, namely Nethack and Dwarf Fortress (the latter being triggered by this book ). Aside from being incredibly fun, they also made me want to play around with writing a roguelike game of my own.
One of Lisp's great features is its condition system. It serves a similar purpose to the exception handling systems in Java, Python, and C++ but is more flexible. In fact, its flexibility extends beyond error handling--conditions are more general than exceptions in that a condition can represent any occurrence during…
This post describes how to compile a single C++ source file to an object file with the Clang API. Here is the code. It behaves like a simplified clang executable that handles -c and -S…
Some updated tips for porting software to Python 3.
