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Programming Languages

The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 361 posts.

2018
31

Async and Await in Rust: a full proposal

I’m really excited to announce the culmination of much of our work over the last four months: a pair of RFCs for supporting async & await notation in Rust. This will be very impactful for Rust in the network services space. The change is proposed as two RFCs: RFC #2394: which adds async & await notation to the…

36

Minimalist C Libraries

In the past year I’ve written a number of minimalist C libraries, particularly header libraries. The distinction for “minimalist” is, of course, completely arbitrary and subjective. My definition in this context isn’t about the library’s functionality being stupidly trivial or even necessarily simple. I’m talking…

38

A Programming Language Underdog

As devs in late 2018, we’ve got lots of programming language choices. Mainstream ones alone, there’s about a dozen or so of them. They’re all awesome. As you wander a bit further down the obscurity path, you’ll find languages like elm , elixir , purescript , and reason . And just past those, you’ll find nim .

42

“Modern” C++ Lamentations

“ Standard Ranges ” blog post by Eric Niebler – about C++20 ranges feature – was doing rounds in the game development twitterverse lately, with many expressing something like a “dislike” (mildly said) about the state of modern C++.

44

A Road to Common Lisp

I've gotten a bunch of emails asking for advice on how to learn Common Lisp in the present day. I decided to write down all the advice I've been giving through email and social media posts in the hopes that someone might find it useful.

51

The relative performance of C and Rust

My blog post on falling in love with Rust got quite a bit of attention – with many being surprised by what had surprised me as well: the high performance of my naive Rust versus my (putatively less naive?) C. However, others viewed it as irresponsible to report these performance differences, believing that these…

52

Parsing: a timeline

In India, Panini creates an exact description of the Sanskrit language, including pronunciation. Sanskrit can be completely reconstructed using nothing but Panini's grammar. Panini's grammar, which predates Euclid, is probably the first formal system of any kind. In the future, nothing like it will exist for any other…

55

How to Use Go Interfaces

I occasionally give free Go consults and code review on top of my daily work. As such, I tend to read a lot of other peoples’ codes. And while this is really more of a feeling *Now, you should go, really? You're a statistician by training ffs, I’ve seen an increase in what I call “Java-style” interface usage. This…

60

Why is Rust difficult?

Rust is considered difficult to learn by many people. Indeed, when I learned it, I considered it to be the hardest programming language up to that time I’ve met. And that says something, since I have a habit of learning whatever language I find interesting. Looking back, I’m not sure I was correct, C++ is probably…