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The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 3,709 posts.
I’ve been going through a period of programming language wanderlust over the past couple months. Recently, I’ve been quite interested in Rust. Coming from Python, I’ve found a lot of Rust’s language features to be quite powerful.
Some readers already know this and a few have suspected. I’ve been working on a new R6RS Scheme compiler for a while. Now I have released it as free software. Read on to learn the many wonderful drawbacks of this niche compiler.
I’ve been exploring the idea of an Elm compiler that produces assembly for the Erlang Virtual Machine. You can find the code for this project on GitHub . This essay documents some interesting parts of the project.
Last week I jokingly said that POPL papers must pass an ‘intellectual intimidation’ threshold in order to be accepted. That’s not true of course, but it is the case that programming languages paper…
Edit 2021-03-30: Jeremy Mikkola wrote about some closely related topics back in 2017. Edit 2021-03-31: Chris Siebenmann wrote a response to this post that explains exactly how interface values that are nil are typed. It’s more complicated than I thought! I’m not sure I have another Rust & Postgres blog post in me…
Background
Lately I’ve been reading old computing papers, articles, journals, magazines, and memos and tweeting about them as I work my way through. The most recent exploration was of an Apple internal memo about the history of Apple’s involvement with Pascal. The memo is cursory, but it does provide an interesting snapshot of…
See also: "Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" , Wikipedia (accessed May 4, 2008).
Nim is a relatively new programming language which allows users to write easy-to-read high-performance code. But if you are reading this Nim tutorial, the chances are that you already know about Nim.
I recently wrote a blog post for CloudFlare about our use of Go . I thought it was worth following up with a bit more detail about why I li...
Users of mature C libraries conventionally get to choose how memory is allocated — that is, when it cannot be avoided entirely . The C standard never laid down a convention — perhaps for the better — so each library re-invents an allocator interface. Not all are created equal, and most repeat a few fundamental…
In Go, go.mod acts as both manifest and lockfile. There is never a reason to look at go.sum.
A strong runner up was this quote, which captures the essence of what we should be trying to do when creating new languages:
This document serves as a collection of reasons why beginners should avoid Python 3 as of November 22nd, 2016. I give two sets of reasons as I see them now. One for total beginners, and another for people who are more knowledgeable about programming. The first section attempts to explain the case against starting with…
Historically, Lisp was a behemoth in the world of language design innovation. The list of Lisp’s innovations is so long that I’d have to list most of the features associated with modern languages. (Do you like if statements? You can thank Lisp!)
The article discusses how Kotlin can create internal languages and how developers can use this feature to write powerful domain-specific languages for manipulating untyped data structures in a typed manner.
Stephen Brennan's personal website and blog.
Programming language memory models answer the question of what behaviors parallel programs can rely on to share memory between their threads. For example, consider this program in a C-like language, where both x and done start out zeroed.
Over the weekend, I was working on a personal Rust project when I ran into an excessive memory usage problem. After an evening of trial and error, I found a workaround to fix the memory usage, but I still didn’t understand how the issue was even possible, so I then spent another evening digging through the source code…
Let's talk compilers with part one of a whistle stop tour of their history
Point-free programming (or point-less programming, for the more cynically inclined) is a paradigm that advocates the formulation of programs by means of function composition. In the point-free styl…
This post is an attempt to explain the incremental parsing algorithm aretext uses for syntax highlighting. Like the rest of aretext, parsers are implemented in Go for portability and performance. Most people do not consider Go a functional programming language; nonetheless, aretext’s parsers rely on functional…
History of the development of my Pascal compiler for transputer when I was age 13.
I released Gorgonia on Thursday. Gorgonia is a library like Theano or TensorFlow, but mainly written in Go. It provides the necessary primitives for creating and executing neural networks and machine learning algorithms. According to cloc, these are the stats…
Mugo is a single-pass compiler for a tiny subset of the Go programming language -- just enough to compile itself.
