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Programming Languages

The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 255 posts.

2021
34

State of the Common Lisp ecosystem, 2020

This is a description of the Common Lisp ecosystem, as of January, 2021, from the perspective of a user and contributor.The purpose of this article is both to give an overview of the ecosystem, and to help drive consolidation in each domain.Each application domain has recommendations for consolidating that part of the…

35

“I Could Rewrite Curl”

Collected quotes and snippets from people publicly sneezing off or belittling what curl is, explaining how easy it would be to make a replacement in no time with no effort or generally not being very helpful. These are statements made seriously. For all I know, they were not ironic. If you find others to add ……

36

Async Ruby

Async Ruby is a powerful and highly scalable concurrency feature. It's available today, it's production-ready, and it's an awesome addition to Ruby language!

40

From First Principles: Why Scala?

Scala, first appearing in 2004, is neither an old stalwart nor a new player in the programming language market. This post will discuss the unique combination of features that Scala provides and how it compares to other languages on the market, diving beneath the superficial experience to explore the fundamentals of…

54

Why Rust strings seem hard

Lately I’ve been seeing lots of anecdotes from people trying to get into Rust who get really hung up on strings (&str, String, and their relationship). Beyond Rust’s usual challenges around ownership, there can be an added layer of frustration because strings are so easy in the great majority of languages. You just…

55

Updating the Go Memory Model

The current Go language memory model was written in 2009, with minor updates since. It is clear that there are at least a few details that we should add to the current memory model, among them an explicit endorsement of race detectors and a clear statement of how the APIs in sync/atomic synchronize programs.

58

Goodbye C++, Hello C

Part 1 of this series about my toy renderer covers the most fundamental design decisions. Over the years, I have written many renderers and for a long time their complexity kept growing. This time, I took the opposite route. I wanted to maximize the fraction of code that implements crucial functionality rather than…

60

Teeing, a hidden gem in the Java API

Last week, I described a use-case for a custom Stream Collector. I received a intriguing comment on Twitter: There was a 'Moved Permanently' error fetching URL: 'https://twitter.com/Miguucm/status/1389258245886390292' Hats off to you, Miguel! Your comment revealed a method I didn’t know! So I decided to investigate…