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Programming Languages

The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 427 posts.

2020
91

Ruby's Proposed STM

There’s a proposal to add Software Transactional Memory , or STM , to the Ruby programming language. This is part of a wider effort to add better support for concurrency and parallelism in Ruby, and in particular the idea of ractors . A concept has been proposed and implemented by Koichi Sasada.

96

Collapse OS – Why Forth?

Collapse OS' first incarnation was written in Z80 assembler. One of the first feedbacks I had after it went viral was "why not Forth?". I briefly looked at it and it didn't seem such a great choice at first, so I first dismissed it. Then, I had what alcoholics refer to as a "Moment of clarity".

97

Nim 1.4

We are very proud to announce Nim version 1.4 after six months of continuous development! Other than version 1.0, this is probably the biggest Nim release yet and we’re very excited to release it!

102

First Impressions of Rust

I've been wanting to write a big project in Rust for a while as a learning exercise, and actually started one in late 2018 (a FUSE server implementation). But then life happened and I got busy and never went anywhere with it. Due to certain world circumstances I'm currently spending a lot of time indoors so rust-fuse…

106

Two Years with Rust

It’s been just over two years since I started learning Rust. Since then, I’ve used it heavily at my day job, including work in the Firecracker code base, and a number of other projects. Rust is a great fit for the systems-level work I’ve been doing over the last few years: often performance- and density-sensitive…

107

A Picture of Java in 2020

This year Java hit an incredible milestone and reached the grand old age of 25 years. We celebrated its jubilee by running a special online Java day event, where lots of expert speakers shared their e

111

Pyston v2: Faster Python

We’re very excited to release Pyston v2, a faster and highly compatible implementation of the Python programming language. Version 2 is 20% faster than stock Python 3.8 on our macrobenchmarks…

112

Names are not type safety

Haskell programmers spend a lot of time talking about type safety . The Haskell school of program construction advocates “capturing invariants in the type system” and “making illegal states unrepresentable,” both of which sound like compelling goals, but are rather vague on the techniques used to achieve them. Almost…

113

Lovely Week with Elixir

Context It’s not often I get excited about programming languages since meeting Ruby in 2015. Way before that, drowning in misery of writing university course works in Java, has pushed me away from development. Ruby’s freedom and expressiveness was what pulled me back, and its style has kept me in. I was on the lookout…

114

Will R Work on Apple Silicon?

At WWDC 2020 earlier this year, Apple announced a transition from Intel to ARM-based processors in their laptops. This blog is about the prospects of when R will work on that platform, based on experimentation on a developer machine running A12Z, one of the “Apple silicon” processors.

117

The Hard Part of Learning a Language

I want to do $THING. Normally I do my hacking in Python, which is okay but has lots of frustrations. My friends tell me $LANGUAGE is better for doing $THING. After going through the online tutorial, I can see why. Maybe I’ll try $LANGUAGE for this project! Just a few things I need to figure out first: How do I install…