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The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 3,709 posts.

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2198

I Wrote a Scheme in 2025

One year minus one week ago to the day I published an article announcing the new Scheme implementation I was writing, scheme-rs . Today I am excited to announce that scheme-rs has reached its first version, 0.1.0 . You can check it out at it’s website ( scheme-rs.org , which should be updated to scheme.rs at some…

2200

Let's write a compiler, part 3: A parser

Tokenizing the source code input is a great start for our compiler. Now let's turn our attention to parsing the PL/0 grammar. Once we have finished with the parser, the front end of our compiler will be finished and we will have a PL/0 validator. This is a program that can read in PL/0 source code and inform the user…

2203

Interesting things about the Lua interpreter (2020)

The Lua programming language is unusual among its peers. It’s a dynamically typed, scripting language with a really small core (100-200kB), but runs efficiently, has far simpler semantics than other similar languages, and is just as old as the giants like JavaScript, Python, and Ruby – first made in a research lab…

2204

Layered Design in Go

This post will describe how I design my programs in Go. I needed this for work, and while I searched for a link, nothing quite fits my coding practices out there. The word “Layered” can pull up some fairly close descriptions, but I want to lay out what I do.

2207

Writing a bare-metal RISC-V application in D

This post will show you how to use D to write a bare-metal “Hello world” program that targets the RISC-V QEMU simulator. In a future blog post ( now available ) we’ll build on this to target actual hardware: the VisionFive 2 SBC. See blog-code for the final code from this post. For a more complex example, see…

2216

Pixie: A sweet Clojure-ish language

It's likely no secret that I really dig Clojure . It's the first unityped language I've used since Objective-C in the early 90s that I really like. Yes, I still love Scala , but I think Clojure is pretty much the best designed computer language I've ever used... and maybe that's because Clojure is mostly "less is…

2218

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.