Topics /

Programming Languages

The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 384 posts.

2019
124

Learn Rust the Dangerous Way

LRtDW is a series of articles putting Rust features in context for low-level C programmers who maybe don’t have a formal CS background — the sort of people who work on firmware, game engines, OS kernels, and the like. Basically, people like me.

128

A Dead-Simple Web Stack in Haskell

Haskell has a proliferation of libraries to choose from for all of your basic backend needs, from logging to database access to routing and web server definition. It's nice to have the freedom of choice, but if you're just starting out, the amount of decisions needed can be overwhelming. Maybe you're not even…

132

OCaml on Baremetal Shakti RISC-V Processor

It has been 3 months since I joined IIT Madras and it has been good fun so far. Along with the members of the RISE group , we’ve initiated a project to build secure applications on top of secure extensions of the open-source Shakti RISC-V processor ecosystem. Unsurprisingly, my language of choice to build the…

134

Garbage Collection

We say Lox is a “high-level” language because it frees programmers from worrying about details irrelevant to the problem they’re solving. The user becomes an executive, giving the machine abstract goals and letting the lowly computer figure out how to get there.

137

Thoughts on Rust, a few thousand lines in

To say my first foray into Rust was a frustrating struggle would be an understatement. I picked a terrible first project that left me neck deep in Rust’s trickiest areas right off the bat. I was excited to try again. A few years ago I wrote Sumoshell, a CLI App for log analysis. I’d wanted to improve it for a while…

138

Racket v7.2

_posted by Vincent St-Amour_ Racket version 7.2 is now available from http://racket-lang.org/ Racket-on-Chez is done in a useful sense, but we'll wait until it gets better before making it the default Racket implementation. For more information, see htt...

139

Generating C code that people want to use

Project Everest is a large, collaborative research effort that aims to verify and deploy a new, secure HTTPS stack. All of our code is verified using the F* programming language. Using KreMLin, a dedicated compiler, the verified F* code is compiled to readable C, meaning existing systems projects can readily integrate…

141

Overview of Rust error handling libraries

Rust's error handling is a pleasure to use thanks to the Result type . It ensures Rust's error handling is always correct , visible , and performant . And with the addition of the ? operator in Rust 1.13 , and the addition of return types from main in Rust 1.26 Rust's error handling has only kept improving.

143

Ruby's Creed

Every programming language has some fundamental idea(s) that drives its design and evolution. For Haskell that’s functional purity and state-of-the-art static typing, for Erlang that’s distributed programming and fault tolerance, for Clojure that’s simplicity and stability. What all these examples have in common is…

144

The CPython Bytecode Compiler Is Dumb

Due to sheer coincidence of several unrelated tasks converging on Python at work, I recently needed to brush up on my Python skills. So far for me, Python has been little more than a fancy extension language for BeautifulSoup , though I also used it to participate in the recent tradition of writing one’s own static…