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Typing lists and tuples in Elixir
This article explores the design decisions of typing lists and tuples in Elixir within a sound gradual type system.
Topics /
Programming Languages
The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 327 posts.
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Forsp: A Forth+Lisp Hybrid Lambda Calculus Language
Recently I've discovered a very interesting language / realization of the Lambda Calculus. I was unable to find any other language like it, which I find quite surprising. In hindsight, the language seems obvious and natural. And the language keeps surprising me. I say "discovered" in the same sense that Paul Graham…
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Translating 10M lines of Java to Kotlin
Meta has been on a years-long undertaking to translate our entire Android codebase from Java to Kotlin. Today, despite having one of the largest Android codebases in the world, we’re well pas…
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Defense of Lisp macros: The automotive field as a case in point
An overview of all the tools, standards and special languages used in the automotive industry where the official language is actually C.
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I'm not mutable, I'm partially instantiated
Incomplete data structures challenge our notion of mutability
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Erlang/OTP 27 Highlights
The official home of the Erlang Programming Language
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How the OCaml type checker works (2022)
A short guide on OCaml type checker, describing the surprisingly elegant algorithm for generalization, which generalizes to first-class polymorphism, MLF and local types. Polymorphism and regions have much in common.
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C23: A Slightly Better C
One of the established and most popular programming languages is the C programming language. It is relatively easy to learn, and highly practical. Maybe surprisingly, the C programming language keeps evolving, slowly and carefully. If you have GCC 13 or LLVM (Clang) 16, you already have a compiler with some of the…
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Sonic Pi: Ruby as a Composition Tool
Like the blip of an intro on the front page says, my degree was originally in music. My running joke as a web dev is that neither has meaningfully required me to count past 32. And while my main concentration was vocals, I've since realized I should probably stop strictly calling this a nontechnical field, because my…
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Constraints in Go
Freedom is nothing without constraints, and Go’s generics gives us a powerful way to build polymorphic types and functions constrained by type sets . Let’s geek out.
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Adding row polymorphism to Damas-Hindley-Milner
Intro to HM
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Byte-Sized Swift: Building Tiny Games for the Playdate
I’m excited to share swift-playdate-examples, a technical demonstration of using Swift to build games for Playdate, a handheld game system by Panic.
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How to Use the Foreign Function API in Java 22 to Call C Libraries
Using Java's Foreign Function API to Call C like fopen, fgets, and fclose.
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Embedded Rust in Production?
A review after using Rust on embedded in production for over a year
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Recent Performance Improvements in Function Calls in CPython
How costly it is to call functions and builtins in your python code? Does inlining help? How have the recent CPython releases improved performance in these areas?
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Compilers for free with weval
With some partial evaluation and specialization hints, it is possible to get pretty decent speedups on interpreters by turning them into compilers.
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The borrow checker within
This post lays out a 4-part roadmap for the borrow checker that I call “the borrow checker within”. These changes are meant to help Rust become a better version of itself, enabling patterns of code which feel like they fit within Rust’s spirit , but run afoul of the letter of its law . I feel fairly comfortable with…
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If Inheritance is so bad, why does everyone use it?
This essay says that inheritance is harmful and if possible you should "ban inheritance completely". You see these arguments a lot, as well as things like...
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Reading "A Programmer's Guide to Common Lisp"
I got a cheap used copy of the book A Programmer's Guide to COMMON LISP by Deborah G. Tatar, Digital Press, 1987. Why did I read such an...
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State of Python 3.13 performance: Free-threading
Python 3.13 is out and it's time to run some benchmarks to see how well it performs with the new free-threaded mode.
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We were wizards – a foreword to Learning Perl (1993)
In the 1990s, computers were magic and we were wizards. Want proof? I offer below, Larry Wall’s foreword to Learning Perl from 1993. It greatly inspired a very young me who wandered into a book shop, picked up an odd book with llama on the cover and a seemingly misspelled title. The first few pages had me hooked and…
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Leveraging Zig's Allocators
How Zig's allocators can help manage memory and improve performance
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Exploring Gleam, a type-safe language on the BEAM
From Erlang, to Elixir and now, GLEAM!?
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Py2wasm – A Python to WASM Compiler
Since starting Wasmer five years ago we've been obsessed with empowering more languages to target the web and beyond through Webassembly. One of the mo...
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My negative views on Rust (2023)
This is a little summary of my current thoughts on Rust. I wonder whether I’ll look back in five years and see if my views have changed.
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Four limitations of Rust's borrow checker
I’ve been using Rust for hobby projects since 2016 and have been working professionally in Rust since 2021, so I tend to consider myself pretty knowledgeable about Rust. I’m already familiar with all the common limitations of Rust’s type system and how to work around them, so it’s pretty rare that I have to “fight the…