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The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 3,707 posts.

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633

Piccolo – A Stackless Lua Interpreter

piccolo is an interpreter for the Lua language written in pure, mostly safe Rust with an eye towards safe sandboxing and resiliency. It uses gc-arena for its garbage collection system, and in fact gc-arena was originally created as part of piccolo .

644

Tree-sitter vs. Language Servers

I got asked a good question today: what is the difference between Tree-sitter and a language server ? I don’t understand how either of these tools work in depth, so I’m just going to explain from an observable , pragmatic point of view.

646

The Rise of Worse Is Better (1991)

I and just about every designer of Common Lisp and CLOS has had extreme exposure to the MIT/Stanford style of design. The essence of this style can be captured by the phrase the right thing . To such a designer it is important to get all of the following characteristics right:

649

Two Years with Rust

It’s been just over two years since I started learning Rust. Since then, I’ve used it heavily at my day job, including work in the Firecracker code base, and a number of other projects. Rust is a great fit for the systems-level work I’ve been doing over the last few years: often performance- and density-sensitive…

656

Crafting Interpreters: 640 Pages in 15 Months

My book Crafting Interpreters on programming languages is done. OK, OK. I know I said it was done like fifteen months ago . But now it’s really done. And by that I mean, the print, e-book and PDF versions are done. You can buy it . You can hold it in your hands. And I do mean “hands” plural. Because this little…

660

How to program a text adventure in C

This is not a C tutorial; there are plenty of those on the web. The reader is assumed to have some basic knowledge of programming in general, and preferrably the C programming language in particular. Maybe you just finished reading a tutorial somewhere, and you would like to learn some more about programming by…