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The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 5,634 posts.

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4682

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).

4687

I Wrote a Compiler

I have a Computer Science degree. I attended a whole course of lectures on compilers (and have a certain fondness for “the red dragon book” as a result). However, I had never actually written a compiler from start to finish until a rainy day last weekend.

4689

Golang at CloudFlare

The other day I blogged here about our new Railgun software that speeds up the back haul between CloudFlare data centers and our clients' servers. At CloudFlare we're using a number of different languages depending on the task.

4692

Teaching Kids Forth

Forth is uncommonly used to teach programming to kids. Scripting languages like Python and visual environments like Scratch are far more popular options. But when I got the opportunity to introduce middle and high school students to programming, I chose the stack-oriented concatenative language from 1970. I was…

4697

How Swift could potentially be faster than Objective-C

Since the introduction of Swift, speed has been a key selling point. Indeed, it's right in the name of the language. It's said to be faster than dynamic languages like Python or JavaScript, potentially faster than Objective-C, and even claimed to be faster than C for certain cases. But how exactly does it do it?

4704

Depending in Common Lisp

A while ago I was working on a Common Lisp library that makes use of the Metaobject Protocol . I ran into a few edge cases around dependencies between classes and it took a while for me to figure out how to solve them, so I wanted to write down what I learned in case anyone else might find it useful. This post is an…

4709

Manipulate Functions with the J Language

The Pragmatic Programmer recommends that we learn at least one new language every year. To be effective, the languages we learn should differ sufficiently from those we already master and ideally introduce us to a new paradigm too. Learning a different programming language affects the way we view code. A new paradigm…

4710

SBCL 2.2.8

New SBCL versions are usually released at the end of each month: check the Sourceforge File List to see the current version. The new features of all SBCL releases are listed below.