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The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 375 posts.
This is not a C tutorial; there are plenty of those on the web. The reader is assumed to have some basic knowledge of programming in general, and preferrably the C programming language in particular. Maybe you just finished reading a tutorial somewhere, and you would like to learn some more about programming by…
Is this clickbait? Not really. Is this the fault of the language or the compiler? Definitely not. Rather, it was part of a rushed migration. Sharing the lessons learned in the process.
Learning the C3 programming language
GCC 15 brings better error messages and diagnostics for your code, including prettier execution paths and easier-to-read compiler errors for C++ templates.
Tracing Rust AtomicU64::fetch_max from macro expansion and rustc intrinsics through LLVM atomicrmw umax down to the final x86-64 CAS loop.
Rust's borrowchecker comes with real downsides
Why Elixir is not just a good platform for modern development, but a great one - addressing common misconceptions
I always told people memory is cheap, black magic is OK and efficiency doesn't matter, but I was wrong.
Standard C undergoes regular improvements, now at C23. But there are baffling things that have not been fixed at all. The Dlang community embedded a C compiler in the D programming language compiler so it could compile C. This C compiler (aka ImportC ) was built from scratch. It provided the opportunity to use modern…
I am experimenting a bit with a new article format: instead of an overarching theme, this is more of a collection of smaller bits and pieces, sewn together.
Programming languages seem to have somewhat stagnated to me. A lot of shuffling around ideas that already exist, not a lot of new ones.
Some of my favorite tidbits from the past year of working with Go.
A novel technique for implementing dynamic language interpreters in Go, applied to the Vitess SQL evaluation engine
This is just a personal experience, there are no absolute truths. Like in any other blog post, a lot of the things you'll read here could be just a skill issue, or legitimate issues. It's up to you to decide.
Why I believe 6502 instruction set is a good first assembly language
A retro on some of the reasons we chose to build Tracebit in C#.
A blog about modern PHP, the web, and programming in general. Follow my newsletter and YouTube channel as well.
Starting with a 192-byte one-liner that implements a Reverse Polish Notation arithmetic compiler, we'll work backward to transform it into readable JavaScript by removing one code golf trick at a time
Swift is heavily used in production for building cloud services at Apple, with incredible results. Last year, the Password Monitoring service was rewritten in Swift, handling multiple billions of requests per day from devices all over the world. In comparison with the previous Java service, the updated backend…
Correctness in the face of cancellations: a written version of my talk at RustConf 2025.
News post: Gleam v1.9.0 released
It's a bit of a silly post, because syntax is the least interesting detail about the language, but, still, I can't stop thinking how Zig gets this detail just right for the class of curly-braced languages, and, well, now you'll have to think about that too.
Today we are announcing an alpha version of Pyrefly, an open source Python type checker and IDE extension crafted in Rust. Pyrefly is a static type checker that analyzes Python code to ensure type …
If you’re already familiar with SIMD, the table is all you need. And if you’re not, you will understand the table by the end of the…
What I’ve learned in my first few hours using Gleam for a small project.
Automatically erase memory to prevent secret leaks.
I first started programming Java at IBM back in 1999 as a Pre-University Employee. If I remember correctly, we had Java 1.1.8 installed at that time, but were moving to Java 1.2 (“Java 2”), which w…
I've been using Nim for about 1-2 years now, and I believe the language is undervalued. It's not perfect, of course, but it's pleasant to write and read. My personal website uses Nim .
