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Programming Languages

The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 255 posts.

2021
211

Debugging Lisp (2015)

This post is for all of the miscellaneous features that arent large enough to get their own individual posts. If you havent read all of them, here are the links to the previous posts on recompilation , inspection , class … Read the rest

213

Resurrecting Fortran

We have finished the first chapter on a long journey of resurrecting Fortran: forming an initial core community of developers and users with enough momentum around the new Fortran website and projects at fortran-lang.org . There is still have a long way to go to, but this was a necessary (although not sufficient)…

216

Async Cancellation

Sometimes we start things but decide midway through that we would prefer to rather not be doing them. That process is sometimes referred to as cancellation. Say we accidentally clicked "download" on a large file in the browser. We should have a way to tell the computer to stop downloading it.

219

Namedtuple in a Post-Dataclasses World

namedtuple has been around since forever, and over time, its convenience saw it used far outside its originally intended purpose. With dataclasses now covering part of those use cases, what should one use named tuples for? In this article, I address this question, and give a few examples from real code.

221

Summary of C/C++ integer rules

This is my own collection of hard-earned knowledge about how integers work in C/C++, and how to use them carefully and correctly. In this article, I try to strike a balance between brevity (easing the reader) and completeness (providing absolute correctness and extensive detail).

224

I got the GNU Modula-2 compiler working on OpenBSD

When it rains it pours. After making a splash with D , 1 I remembered that some time ago I began an attempt to bring the GNU Modula-2 compiler to OpenBSD . Because why not? Modula-2 is a language that exists and has compiler implementations. I guess my goal is to bring all the languages and compilers to OpenBSD. And…

234

Latches in C++20

Latches and barriers are coordination types that enable some threads to wait until a counter becomes zero. You can use a std::latch only once, but you can use a std::barrier more than once. Today, I have a closer look at latches.

236

Emacs Lisp Readable Closures (2013)

I’ve stated before that one of the unique features of Emacs Lisp is that its closures are readable . Closures can be serialized by the printer and read back in with the reader. I am unaware of any other programming language that has this feature. In fact it’s essential for Elisp byte-code compilation because…

239

Rust is not a company

Last year, as an occasional contributor to the Rust project, I did not think much about the organisational structure of the team behind the project. I saw a hierarchy of teams and groups, team leaders, etc. Just like any other organisation. This year, after getting more involved, becoming a library team member and…