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Programming Languages

The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 327 posts.

2024
302

Cursed Linear Types in Rust

Inspired by Jack Wrenn’s post on Undroppable Types in Rust, I set out to see if it’s possible to create types that must be used exactly once. From my understanding, those things are called linear types, but don’t quote me on that1. Unless you are quoting the title of this article which explicitly says linear types… I…

306

Elixir Gotchas

No, I’ve not gone to the click-baiters (“10 tips that will change your life today!!!”), but I chose to limit myself to just 10 so that I don’t pull what is considered a &#82…

308

Emit

One of the interesting aspects of a concatenative language like Factor is that blocks of logic can be easily extracted and easily reused since they apply logic to objects on the stack .

309

Ruby might be faster than you think

I saw a project a couple weeks back which allows writing and running Crystal methods inline inside a Ruby file. It’s a neat project, and I don’t want to take away from it but something in the README example looked off to me. require 'crystalruby' require 'benchmark' module Fibonnaci crystalize [n:

310

The theory of concatenative combinators (2007)

This article attempts to outline, in informal terms, a new theory of combinators, related to the theory of Combinatory Logic pioneered by Moses Schonfinkel, Haskell Curry, and others in the 1930s. Although not essential, an understanding of the classical theory of combinators may be helpful (see the links at the…

312

Move semantics in Rust, C++, and Hylo

I just finished reading the paper Borrow checking Hylo . It outlines the basic design of Hylo . Hylo is an early-stage programming language, but unlike other contenders of C++, it provides memory safety like rust. Specifically it merges rust’s borrow checking ideas into the framework of moveable value semantics (MVS)…

318

Bringing Faster Exceptions to Rust

Three months ago, I wrote about why you might want to use panics for error handling. Even though it’s a catchy title, panics are hardly suited for this goal, even if you try to hack around with macros and libraries. The real star is the unwinding mechanism, which powers panics. This post is the first in a series…

321

Quote-unquote "macros"

You’ve probably seen this Python 101 thing before: @memoized def fib(n): if n <= 1: return n return fib(n - 1) + fib(n - 2) Leaving aside the absurdity of computing Fibonacci numbers recursively, it’s a common first introduction to Python decorators and higher-order functions. fib is just a function, and memoized…

324

ElixirNitpicks

You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites . This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.

327

Scooping the Loop Snooper (2000)

No general procedure for bug checks will do. Now, I won’t just assert that, I’ll prove it to you. I will prove that although you might work till you drop, you cannot tell if computation will stop. For imagine we have a procedure called P that for specified input permits you to see whether specified source code, with…