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Programming Languages

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

2022
3

Rust: A Critical Retrospective

Since I was unable to travel for a couple of years during the pandemic, I decided to take my new-found time and really lean into Rust. After writing over 100k lines of Rust code, I think I am starting to get a feel for the language and like every cranky engineer I have developed opinions and because this is the…

5

Rust Is Hard, Or: The Misery of Mainstream Programming

When you use Rust, it is sometimes outright preposterous how much knowledge of language, and how much of programming ingenuity and curiosity you need in order to accomplish the most trivial things. When you feel particularly desperate, you go to rust/issues and search for a solution for your problem. Suddenly, you…

7

Embed is in C23

It happened. Nearly 5 years of paper writing, being snuck Committee Meeting notes on the DL until I could access them myself and absolve my co-conspirators of their sins, 5 different implementations/patches later, I can

14

Deno Is Webby

The Deno team recently shipped Deno by example : Deno by example is a collection of annotated examples for how to use Deno, and the various features it…

16

What’s so great about functional programming anyway?

To hear some people talk about functional programming, you’d think they’d joined some kind of cult. They prattle on about how it’s changed the way they think about code. They’ll extol the benefits of purity, at length. And proclaim that they are now able to “reason about their code”—as if all other code is irrational…

17

Unreal Rust

A few months ago I asked myself "What if I could write a game in Rust, but use Unreal as a renderer?". After a bit of thinking I came to the conclusion that exposing the Unreal renderer to Rust via C ffi was way more work than I was willing to do. But what if I could just build on top of Unreal instead? I could just…

20

Dear sir, you have built a compiler

I am afraid to inform you that you have built a compiler. I know you wanted a “simple prototype” that would just add that one feature to your programming model. You said that “SSA is an overkill” and “it’s just way too much infrastructure to maintain for a simple task” and yet, six months later, you have pile of…

22

Phoenix 1.7 is View-less

Phoenix 1.7 is dropping Phoenix.View, but it's for a good reason! Controllers and LiveViews will now render function components. And the aim is to collocate templates next to the controller that renders them!

27

Why I program in Erlang (2012)

Erlang is a twenty-five-year-old programming language that has yet to win a popularity contest, and almost certainly will never win any medals for speed, let alone any tiaras for syntactic beauty. The language is slow, awkward, and ugly. Refactoring Erlang code is a pain.