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The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 5,634 posts.

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2044

In Defense of C++

I really like C++. It's not the right tool for every job, but it's what I reach for when I need to do any kind of systems programming. Unfortunately, C++ has often been cited as a "bad" language, and I feel like that reputation has worsened over time. Recent languages like Go and Rust have taken over a lot of mind…

2051

C++20 Ranges

As you may have heard by now, Ranges got merged and will be part of C++20. This is huge news and represents probably the biggest shift the Standard Library has seen since it was first standardized …

2057

JEP 450: Compact Object Headers

Reduce the size of object headers in the HotSpot JVM from between 96 and 128 bits down to 64 bits on 64-bit architectures. This will reduce heap size, improve deployment density, and increase data locality.

2067

C was not created as an abstract machine

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…

2069

From Julia to Rust

I've been more serious about learning Rust recently, after dragging on with passive learning for a while. My first real programming language was Julia, and I know other Julians interested in Rust. I've written this article for those people in mind, because Rust and Julia are good performance sparring partners, but…

2070

Weird Expressions in Rust

Rust has a very powerful type system, but as a result it has some quirks, some would say cursed expressions. There’s a test file, weird-expr.rs , in the rust repository that tests for some of these and makes sure there consistent between updates. So I wanted to go over each of these and explain how it’s valid rust.