Topics /

Programming Languages

The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 256 posts.

2022
153

Go's Concurrency Examples in Java 19

There is no way for your operating system to know exactly how much stack space a thread will need so it allocates an amount on the order of around a kilobyte initially and then around a megabyte once the thread starts to be used. You only have around a bakers dozen gigabytes of RAM, so you can only have give or take…

155

I Built a Ruby Parser

Sorry, this post will read like a “dear diary” entry rather than some life-changing HN-worthy guidance. Back in November 2020, almost on a whim I started work on a new parser for the Ruby programming language. It was almost exactly a year after I had started working on my compiler project (I hope to write a longer…

158

The German School of Lisp (2011)

The German school of Lisp is described by Kazimir Majorinc as a Spartan movement 1 in Lisp implementation. But let me be clear, the Lisps in question are not toys like the one’s littering the Lisp landscape (including my own ). Likewise, these Lisps are not libraries nor are they full-blown development ecosystems.

160

Zero Feet: a proposal for a systems-free Lisp

Some make the claim that "all languages depend on C"; 1 not only is this statement ill-typed, as implementations perhaps depend on other languages, and languages rarely do, but the statement would still be wrong if we correct it. Some will retort by writing parts of an implementation in another "system language"; more…

163

Golang Diaries: Generics

My coding time this year has been invested in Quamina , an event-filtering library implemented in Go. Just in the last couple of weeks I spotted an opportunity to bring Go’s shiny new generics to bear, and not just anywhere, but for a central data structure. I got good results, but the process was sort of painful; I…

164

A Review of the Odin Programming Language

A review of the Odin programming language # Written by Dale Weiler Twitter GitHub Last updated Tuesday, September 10th, 2022 What is Odin # For those unfamiliar, Odin is a systems programming language that is more conservative in its design than other newer programming languages such as Rust, Zig, and Carbon. The…

168

Delimiter-first code

A new top-level syntax for programming languages is proposed to show advantages of this method. New syntax is arguably as simple, but more consistent, better preserves visual structure and solves some issues in code formatting.

170

What Is Rust's Unsafe? (2019)

I’ve seen a lot of misconceptions around what the unsafe keyword means for the utility and validity of Rust and its marketing as a “safe systems language”. The truth is a lot more complicated than a single pithy tweet can possibly sum up, unfortunately; here it is as I see it.

173

The Futures of Inform

This is a talk and slides from Narrascope 2022, held online in July 2022. It completes a trilogy — I also spoke at Narrascope I and Narrascope II. I’m grateful to the IFTF, and particularly to Judith Pintar and Andrew Plotkin, for arranging the opportunity.

174

I like Odin

As someone who is interested in systems programming, and has experience working with Go, but not with C or C++1, The Odin language is a great fit. Proper systems language Odin is a systems langauge…

177

Embracing Modern C++ Safely, Book Review

C++11 has been around for around 11 years and C++14 for 8. From my experience, I see that even today, many companies struggle to use those standards in production in the most efficient way. As always, with new stuff came benefits, risks, and increased learning effort. Fortunately, with a new book written by top C++…