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

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Oh, Go Ahead, Overthink FizzBuzz (2008)

I gave the best programming interview answer I may have ever given last Friday. The interviewer hauled out FizzBuzz and asked me to solve it. It took me a minute to stop laughing. FizzBuzz is a brain-dead simple programming problem, used pretty much to tell if a developer has a pulse at all. It is…

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Strange C Syntax

In my attempts to learn the C programming language well enough to write my own C compiler , I've encountered some very interesting examples of C syntax that you generally don't see every day. All of these examples you'll see here will compile without warnings or errors even with very strict compiler flags in gcc and…

4790

Cargo's next few years

The Cargo team have been thinking about and discussing long-term plans for Cargo. In this post I'll talk about what we hope Cargo will look like around the time of the next edition (assuming there is another edition and that it happens in about three years, neither of which is

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QBE – Compiler Backend – 1.3

QBE 1.3 took a while to cook, but it is the most significant release since 1.0 with around 7k new lines of code and 1.5k deleted ones. In addition to the usual bug fixes, QBE gained a new and original IL matching algorithm, new optimizations from Roland Paterson-Jones, Scott Graham added support for the Windows ABI…

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Ways to generate SSA

Static Single Assignment is a program representation where each “variable” (though this term can be misleading) is assigned exactly once. Mostly the variables aren’t variables at all, but instead names for values—for expressions. SSA is used a lot in compilers. See this lesson from Cornell for converting Bril to SSA…

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Top-Down LR Parsing

This semester, I am teaching Compilers , and I'm quite happy with how I covered parsing this year. Specifically, I taught students to build a top-down LR parser and it seemed to go relatively well.

4794

FasterCGI with HHVM

Today, we are happy to announce FastCGI support for HHVM. FastCGI is a popular protocol for communication between an application server (e.g. running your PH...

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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…