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Defer available in gcc and clang
About a year ago I posted about defer and that it would be available for everyone using gcc and/or clang soon. So it is probably time for an update. Two things have happened in the mean time: A tec…
Topics /
Programming Languages
The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 149 posts.
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Thoughts on Generating C
wingolog: article: six thoughts on generating c
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The curious case of the disappearing Polish S (2015)
One keyboard bug three decades in the making
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Lisp's Influence on Ruby
Once I wrote users.select { |u| u.admin? }.map(&:email) and realized I’d written Lisp.
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Type-safe HTML templating in Zig
I’ve done a lot of web development over the years. I started around the year 2000, just after PHP 3.0 was released and started taking over the web world. I’ve used all kinds of approaches for generating HTML: raw PHP, string concatenation in Python, Smarty templates in PHP, Template Toolkit in Perl, and Jinja/Django…
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C++ std::move doesn't move anything: A deep dive into Value Categories
Why std::move is just a cast, how it kills RVO if used wrong, and the mechanics of ownership transfer.
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Parse, Don't Validate and Type-Driven Design in Rust
Applying the type-driven mindset to rust via the "Parse, don't Validate" pattern
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An incoherent Rust
Coherence and the orphan rules are a frequent source of complaints about Rust, and a common topic of language proposals. This post covers most of the existing proposals around coherence and my vision for how we should solve coherence once and for all.
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An agent in 100 lines of Lisp
Around 2000 I took an AI course at the University of Guelph. I don’t think I learned too much. We didn’t talk about neural networks, as far as I can remember. My end of term project was, I think, a pathfinding algorithm wearing an AI costume. There were certainly no discussions of transformers. No CUDA. No PyTorch…
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RE#: how we built the fastest regex engine in F#
around a year ago, we built a regex engine in F# that not only outperformed the ones in dotnet, but went above and beyond competing with every other industrial regex engine on a large set of industry-standard benchmarks. it also supports the full set of boolean operators (union, intersection, complement) and even a…
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.NET (OK, C#) finally gets union types
In this post I discuss the support for union types released in .NET 11, how they're implemented, the choices made, and how to create your own
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sp.h: Fixing C by giving it a high quality, ultra portable standard library
Over the past year, I’ve been working on fixing C by giving it a high quality, ultra portable standard library. It is not a simple wrapper on top of libc; it doesn’t depend on libc except when required to by the platform. To my knowledge, there is nothing like it.
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Some C habits I employ for the modern day
Despite it being the first “proper” programming language I learned—by reading K&R front-to-back no less—I don’t write C too terribly often nowadays. Playing resonite has gotten me into writing a load of C# for modding the game, and most of what I do day-to-day is automating the tedium on my computer, which gets…
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The Folders Programming Language
Created 2015 | Updated 2026 | One of Forty-Four Esolangs , by the creator of Rivulet and Velato
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Turbo Haskell
Exactly a week ago (as a joke), I started writing THC, my “Turbo Haskell compiler,” while on vacation visiting Bartosz Milewski.
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Visualizing Rust's Vtables: How dyn Trait Works In Memory
A follow-along series of coding experiments as I explore Rust's peculiarities, from a C++ developer's perspective.
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A perfectable programming language
At a party, Sydney Von Arx asked if I could name 40 programming languages. Yeah, that's the Bay for you. Racket, Agda, Clean, Elm, TypeScript, sh, ASP, Verilog, JavaScript, Scheme, Rust, Nim, INTERCAL, sed, Isabelle, Visual Basic, zsh, AlokScript, Coq, Idris, Hack, Prolog, Whitespace, PureScript, Go, Odin, Haskell…
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The state of SIMD in Rust in 2026
A lot of progress was made since last year, and I made some of it!
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A Road to Lisp: Which Lisp
Comparison of modern Lisp dialects
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2026 is an exciting year for the Rust compiler (and me)
Matyáš Racek's blog
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TruffleRuby
TruffleRuby started as my internship project at Oracle Labs in early 2013. It is an implementation of the Ruby programming language on the JVM, using the Graal dynamic compiler and the Truffle AST interpreter framework . TruffleRuby can achieve peak performance well beyond that possible in JRuby at the same time as…
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A tail-call interpreter in (nightly) Rust
Exploring tail-call-style interpreter implementation with an optimized Uxn emulator, on ARM, x86, and WebAssembly
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Small Programs and Languages
My Implementing a Forth article got some great feedback, particularly around the subject of tiny Forth implementations. (And it was an excuse to list some of the tiniest Forths I’ve seen.)
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Python's pre-declared constants are kinda weird
python has 6 pre-declared "constants": True , False , None , __debug__ , Ellipsis (or equivalently ... ), and NotImplemented . but they all behave slightly differently, for some reason.
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Java sealed classes and exhaustive pattern matching
Java 17 introduced sealed classes, which allow you to explicitly list the allowed sub-types of an interface or base class. For example, here’s a toy example using a sealed interface and records (in…
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Four Months of Zig
It has been about four months since I returned to Zig after being absent for a few years. In this time, I have written some software in Zig and reengaged with the community, online and in person. I decided to share some of that experience, including what I have liked about Zig so far and what I haven't. I'll include…
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Valen's Memory Safety: A New Kind of Borrow Checking
You all know me, I love exploring new memory safety approaches and blending them together in weird ways.
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WASM is not quite a stack machine
Everyone knows Wasm is a stack machine. Wikipedia says so, the official Wasm design specification says so, you get it. I thought so too. That is, until I started writing Wasm code – not compiling for Wasm, but writing the instructions by hand. And I found out that there exists a major difference between Wasm and all…