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The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 149 posts.
When Jarred joined the Zig community about 5 years ago, I described him as someone who had strong "beginner energy". That is, he moved fast and tried a lot of different stuff, jumping head first into problems that he was not yet equipped to solve, leading to mediocre outcomes in terms of engineering, but learning a…
For the past year and a half, the team building Roc 's compiler has been rewriting our 300,000 lines of Rust code into Zig , for reasons I'll recap below. We recently passed an exciting milestone: feature parity with the original compiler!
I never thought it could happen to me. I mean, parentheses? In this day and age? But for the past couple years, my go-to programming language for fun side projects has been a little Lisp dialect called Janet. (print "hey janet") I like Janet so much that I wrote an entire book about it, and put it on The Internet for…
Python 3.15’s JIT is now back on track
It's that time of the year again, a new version of Python is just around the corner. With the Python 3.15.0b1 feature freeze, we know what's...
A cheat sheet of real-world timing and memory numbers to guide performance-sensitive decisions.
C++: The Documentary premiered today on YouTube, and it was great to be on the live chat with Bjarne and many other key folks who participated in C++’s history. I’m honored to have been…
On October 23, 2026, the unthinkable happened. It was supposed to be a mere formality: C++26 was up for a vote by the ISO National Bodi...
Interactive mini-book on concurrent programming in Go.
Date: 2026-07-15 Git: https://gitlab.com/mort96/blog/blob/published/content/00000-home/00017-sqlite-editions.md
A Guide to comparing Claude Code Compiler with GCC
From the Archive: Thoughts on Swift, while learning Rust
I am now generating this website with Clojure (yes, right after rewriting it in GNU Make and shell ; I have a problem, ok?). In a personal tradition, I used writing a static site generator as the project to play with and learn Clojure as a new language. While I’ve long scoffed at Clojure for its copious syntax ( three…
Someone on Reddit recently asked: What would make a Rust implementation of something faster than a C implementation, all things being the same? I think this is…
News flash: C++26 is done! 🎉 On Saturday, the ISO C++ committee completed technical work on C++26 in (partly) sunny London Croydon, UK. We resolved the remaining international comments on the C++26…
I have been told that when proposing to formalise mathematics these days, you have to explain why you are not using Lean. And that reminds me why I left the dependent-typed world 40 years ago: its cultism, insularity and conformity. Lean is a great language with good tools, a large library and a huge, enthusiastic…
just a diary
I built KillSwitch, an esoteric language designed to confound LLMs and coding agents, and benchmarked the major models against it.
Demonstrating the basics of logic programming with data from the Pokémon games.
What Zig felt like, coming from Rust Intro I’ve spent the last 7 years as a Rust developer, working mostly on open source projects, and I’d like to think I’ve built a solid feel for the language and its ecosystem along the way. I gravitate toward the functional side of Rust like clean functions, expressive types, that…
In Why Lean is Faster Than Rust , the author shares an impressive result: a DEFLATE compression library written in Lean 4 , a functional programming language and proof assistant, outperforming an equivalent Rust package that crates.io says has been downloaded over a billion times. From the article:
Java 26 is here, and its main purpose seems to be to provide a solid foundation for future things to come. It comes with a few new features, some performance improvements and multiple enhancements that mention Project Valhalla as the inspiration for their existence. This post has all the info!
I don’t think I’ve ever quite articulated my “grand vision” for Rust, despite having written a fair bit about the language and its features. There is a lot I could say here, but currently there are three directions of development which I find particularly interesting:
As a member of the Zig core team, one of the most impactful projects I’ve been involved with is the implementation of incremental compilation into the Zig compiler. This feature allows the compiler to detect which individual functions and declarations have changed since a project was last built, recompile only that…
i found yet another way to invoke arbitrary functions in javascript without using parentheses
Scheme (and Lisp) lets you express complex systems and problem domains in simpler terms than any other language can. For all its brilliance, Haskell resists most of the attempts people make to just hack and write useful code quickly.
I got asked a good question today: what is the difference between Tree-sitter and a language server ? I don’t understand how either of these tools work in depth, so I’m just going to explain from an observable , pragmatic point of view.
