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Programming Languages

The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 258 posts.

2020
211

Move, simply

C++ “move” semantics are simple, and unchanged since C++11. But they are still widely misunderstood, sometimes because of unclear teaching and sometimes because of a desire to view move…

217

Why the Sorbet type checker is fast

This is the second in an indefinite series of posts about things that I think went well in the Sorbet project. The previous one covered our testing approach. Sorbet is fast. Numerous of our early users commented specifically on how fast it was, and how much they appreciated this speed. Our informal benchmarks on…

222

Smalltalk-87

In late 1986 and early 1987 an ad hoc group of Smalltalk implementors got together to see if they could agree on a design for the next major version of Smalltalk, after Smalltalk-80. The intent was that what they agreed upon would feed into an IEEE standardization process. That process never got

229

Dave Prosser's C Preprocessing Algorithm (2006)

For about five years I've been trying to implement a fully conforming C preprocessor for the front end of the CScout refactoring browser. I've found this to be a fiendishly difficult task. Although what I have written can correctly process million-line real-life projects, every once in a while I come across a…

232

Types as axioms, or: playing god with static types

A common perspective is that types are restrictions . Static types restrict the set of values a variable may contain, capturing some subset of the space of “all possible values.” Under this worldview, a typechecker is sort of like an oracle, predicting which values will end up where when the program runs and making…

236

Writing a DSL in Lua (2015)

DSLs, or domain specific languages, are programming languages that are designed to implement a set of features specific to a particular problem or field. An example could be Make , the build tool, which is a specially designed language for combining ...

238

Shipping Const Generics in 2020

It’s hard to believe that its been more than 3 years since I opened RFC 2000 , which defined the const generics for Rust. At the same time, reading the RFC thread, there’s also been a huge amount of change in this area: for one thing, at the time the RFC was written, const fns weren’t stable, and consts weren’t even…

239

Even in Go, concurrency is still not easy

You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…