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TypeScript: Branded Types
How to brand TypeScript types for norminal typing, providing an automated and easy-to-use way of making a type nominal.
Topics /
Programming Languages
The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 327 posts.
122
Crunch – a Scheme compiler with a minimal runtime
Hi, I'm Peter Bex, a Scheme and free software enthusiast from the Netherlands. See my user page on the CHICKEN wiki or my git server for some of my projects.
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Common misconceptions about compilers
A curated list of misconceptions about mainstream compilers.
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Jank development update – Moving to LLVM IR
Learn about jank's upcoming LLVM IR codegen, Rust interop plans, and more.
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Borrow Checking, RC, GC, and the Eleven () Other Memory Safety Approaches
Zeke: "Wait, so with generational references, we now have four ways to do memory safety?"
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Why not just do simple C++ RAII in C?
Ever since I finished publishing the “defer” paper and successfully defended it on its first go-around (it now has tentative approval to go to a Technical Specification, I just need to obtain the necessary written boilerplate to do so), an old criticism
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Ruby methods are colorless
👋🏼 This is part of series on concurrency, parallelism and asynchronous programming in Ruby. It’s a deep dive, so it’s divided into 12 main parts: Your Ruby programs are always multi-threaded: Part 1 Your Ruby programs are always multi-threaded: Part 2 Consistent, request-local state Ruby methods are colorless The…
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PyPy has been working for me for several years now
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
129
Small Strings in Rust: smolstr vs. smartstring (2020)
Hey everyone! This article is brought to you by a shameless nerd snipe, courtesy of Pascal. In case you’ve blocked Twitter for your own good, this reads: There should be a post explaining and compa...
130
Unification in Elixir
Pattern matching is a pervasive and powerful tool in Elixir. This isn't too surprising if you know a little about the history of Elixir's parent language, Erlang. Erlang was originally inspired by and written in Prolog, a logic programming language where pattern matching has first-class support. In
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Rustgo: Calling Rust from Go with near-zero overhead (2017)
Go has good support for calling into assembly, and a lot of the fast cryptographic code in the stdlib is carefully optimized assembly, bringing speedups of over 20 times.
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Embracing Common Lisp in the modern world
Explore how Common Lisp and Clojure shape modern programming, and discover why understanding these foundations is crucial for tech choices today
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Go: Sentinel errors and errors.Is() slow your code down by 3000%
An exhaustive set of benchmarks on different ways to approach error handling in Golang. We demonstrate that common sentinel error idioms are slow your code down by 5x.
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The bane of my existence: Supporting both async and sync code in Rust
Sit beside me and hear this crazy old man's tale of when I asked Rust for too much
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Identifying Rust's collect:<Vec<_>>() memory leak footgun
Over the weekend, I was working on a personal Rust project when I ran into an excessive memory usage problem. After an evening of trial and error, I found a workaround to fix the memory usage, but I still didn’t understand how the issue was even possible, so I then spent another evening digging through the source code…
137
A History of C Compilers – Part 1: Performance, Portability and Freedom
Let's talk compilers with part one of a whistle stop tour of their history
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Stop making me memorize the borrow checker
I started learning Rust about 3 or 4 years ago. I am now knee-deep in several very complex Rust projects that keep slamming into the limitations of the Rust compiler. One of the most common and obnoxious problems is hitting a situation the borrow-checker can’t deal with and realizing that I need to completely…
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V Language Review (2023)
Review about V programming language in 2023
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I'm Betting on Call-by-Push-Value
Why call-by-push-value is the best evaluation strategy, and why it's going to take over
141
500 Python Interpreters
As we approach the final release date for Python 3.13, I’ve seen an uptick in discussion regarding 3.13’s introduction of an optional GIL. While removing the GIL has been a long time coming for the average user (I’ve dreamt of this for nearly 20 years), there have actually been two concurrent efforts to improve…
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My mental model of setf was wrong
Lisp lets programs define new setf forms for assignment. The most common example is from CLOS , where a class like this:
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How we centralized and structured error handling in Golang
Handling errors in Go is simple and flexible – yet no structure! It’s supposed to be simple, right? Just return an error , wrapped with a message, and move on. Well, that simplicity quickly turns into chaotic as our codebase grows with more packages, more developers, and more “quick fixes” that stay there forever…
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Bril: An Intermediate Language for Teaching Compilers
I created a new intermediate language, called Bril, for teaching my funky open-source, hands-on compilers course. Because it’s for education, Bril prioritizes simplicity and regularity over more typical compiler priorities like performance and concision. This is an overview of Bril’s design, its quirks, and the…
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Dennis Ritchie on the priorities of && || vs. == etc. (1982)
Early C had no separate operators for & and && or | and || . (Got that?) Instead it used the notion (inherited from B and BCPL ) of "truth-value context": where a Boolean value was expected, after "if" and "while" and so forth, the & and | operators were interpreted as && and || are now; in ordinary expressions, the…
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C++ left arrow operator (2016)
Sometimes you have a pointer to a class, and you want to invoke a method. You can use the -> operator for that.
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Optimizing Guile Scheme
Guile is a rather niche language that I love dearly. Guile is a Scheme dialect that features an advanced optimizing bytecode compiler, a JIT compiler, and a modest set of developer tools for inspecting and debugging. Through my time spent developing Chickadee , a game programming library, I have gotten quite familiar…
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Curl removes experimental HTTP back end in Rust
The ride is coming to an end. The experiment is done. We tried, but we admit defeat. Four years ago we started adding support for an alternative HTTP backend in curl. It would use a library written in rust, called hyper. The idea was to introduce an alternative implementation of HTTP internals that you could ……