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The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 5,634 posts.
JavaScript to Rust and Back Again: A Wasm-Bindgen Tale
Recently we’ve seen how WebAssembly is incredibly fast to compile, speeding up JS libraries, and generating even smaller binaries. We’ve even got a high-level plan for better interoperability between the ...
Beginner's guide to OCaml beginner's guides
Alex Clemmer is a computer programmer. Other programmers love Alex, excitedly describing him as "employed here" and "the boss's son".
The state of SIMD in Rust in 2026
A lot of progress was made since last year, and I made some of it!
Coming Soon – AWS SDK for Go
My colleague Peter Moon wrote the guest post below and asked me to get it out to the world ASAP! — Jeff; AWS currently offers SDKs for seven different programming languages – Java, C#, Ruby, Python, JavaScript, PHP, and Objective C (iOS), and we closely follow the language trends among our customers and the general […]
Swift Atomics
I’m delighted to announce Swift Atomics, a new open source package that enables direct use of low-level atomic operations in Swift code. The goal of this library is to enable intrepid systems programmers to start building synchronization constructs (such as concurrent data structures) directly in Swift.
Steel Bank Common Lisp 2.0
New SBCL versions are usually released at the end of each month: check the Sourceforge File List to see the current version. The new features of all SBCL releases are listed below.
Inside Erlang – Joe Armstrong tells his story (2014)
Erlang is a programming language designed by Ericsson and used by a number of companies such as WhatsApp, Amazon and Facebook. Watch its creator Joe Armstrong speak about its development and enduring popularity.
QEMU should move from C to Rust
Welcome Redditors and HackerNews folks! This post is getting attention outside the QEMU community, so I'd like to highlight two things that...
Java record pattern matching in JDK 19
Enhance the Java programming language with record patterns to deconstruct record values. Record patterns and type patterns can be nested to enable a powerful, declarative, and composable form of data navigation and processing. This is a preview language feature .
How an MIT research project became the Julia programming language
Julia, the programming language that originated as a research project at MIT, has gained a loyal following among scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and others. The free and open-source language counts more than 1 million users, including people at thousands of companies and universities around the world.
Go 1.18 will embed source version information into binaries
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…
The First Lisp Compiler
This page examines the earliest surviving Lisp compiler, written by Timothy Hart and Michael Levin around 1961. To avoid repetition of phrases like “the compiler”, we will use the abbreviation “ HLC ” (for “Hart–Levin Compiler”) to refer to it. The HLC was introduced in M.I.T. AIM -039 and documented more fully in the…
Counting Things in Python: A History
Sometimes the Pythonic way to solve a problem changes over time. As Python has evolved, so has the Pythonic way to count list items. Let’s look at...
On the expressive power of programming languages (2019)
On the Expressive Power of Programming Languages with Shriram Krishnamurthi | September 12, 2019 in St. Louis, Missouri
Swift Achieved Dynamic Linking Where Rust Couldn't (2019)
For those who don’t follow Swift’s development, ABI stability has been one of its most ambitious projects and possibly it’s defining feature, and it finally shipped in Swift 5 . The result is something I find endlessly fascinating, because I think Swift has pushed the notion of ABI stability farther than any language…
Perl is 26 Today
Larry Wall released Perl to the public on December 18, 1987. Love it or hate it, Perl's influence is immense.
Emacs 26 Brings Generators and Threads
Emacs 26.1 was recently released . As you would expect from a major release, it comes with lots of new goodies. Being a bit of an Emacs Lisp enthusiast , the two most interesting new features are generators ( iter ) and native threads ( thread ).
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.
JEP draft: Prepare to make final mean final
Issue warnings about uses of deep reflection to mutate final fields. These warnings aim to prepare developers for a future release that ensures integrity by default by restricting final field mutation, which will make Java programs safer and potentially faster. Application developers can avoid both current warnings…