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What’s new in Swift 6.2
Raw identifiers, backtraces, task naming, and more.
Topics /
Programming Languages
The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 375 posts.
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Safe C++ proposal is not being continued
One year ago, the Safe C++ proposal was made. The goal was to add a safe subset/context into C++ that would give strong guarantees (memory safety, type safety, …
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Evolving Scala
There is always ongoing discussion about the future direction of the Scala language. How fast should it move? What needs to be improved? Should the language change at all? This article discusses how Scala must keep evolving , why that evolution is necessary, and what directions we expect that evolution to take. We…
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Designing a Language (2017)
Of course you want to design (and implement!) your own programming language! It’s fun. It’s creative. It’s empowering.
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Softmax forever, or why I like softmax
[UPDATE: Feb 8 2025] my amazing colleague Max Shen noticed a sign mistake in my derivation of the partial derivative of the log-harmonic function below.
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Elliptical Python Programming
One thing I love about Python is how it comes with its very own built-in zen. In moments of tribulations, when I am wrestling with crooked code and tangled thoughts, I often find solace in its timeless wisdom. Here's a glimpse of the clarity it provides:
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Easel Turns One One year of building my own IDE in Clojure
Easel is an IDE written in Clojure that I've been working on for the last year. See it in action https://youtu.be/sceGtaNHxcM .
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Gleam v1.7
News post: Gleam v1.7.0 released
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Swiftly 1.0
Today we’re delighted to introduce the first stable release of swiftly, a Swift version manager that takes the pain out of installing, managing and updating your Swift toolchain.
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I coded a Pascal compiler for transputer as a teen in 1993
History of the development of my Pascal compiler for transputer when I was age 13.
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Working through 'Writing A C Compiler'
Some time ago I decided I wanted to create a c compiler for the Hack processor in the nand2tetris book. After several dead end attempts that I might describe later I found this book : Writing a C C…
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Today I learned that bash has hashmaps (2024)
Xe Iaso's personal website.
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C: Simple Defer, Ready to Use
With this post I will concentrate on the here and now: how to use C’s future lifesaving defer feature with existing tools and compilers.
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Getting silly with C, part (void*)2
They won't be able to find bugs in your code if they can't figure out how it works.
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Rust Any part 3: we have upcasts
Some good news is coming in Rust 1.86
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Go Cryptography State of the Union
I delivered my traditional Go Cryptography State of the Union talk at GopherCon US 2025 in New York. It goes into everything that happened at the intersection of Go and cryptography over the last year.
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The lost cause of the Lisp machines
I am just really bored by Lisp Machine romantics at this point: they should go away. I expect they never will....
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The Green Tea Garbage Collector
Go 1.25 includes a new experimental garbage collector, Green Tea.
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The Core of Rust
within Rust is a smaller language struggling to get out
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Haskelling My Python
Reimplementing Haskell lazy infinite lists using Python generators
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Linear algebra explains why some words are effectively untranslatable
A modest mathematical framing of language
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What's New in C# 14: Null-Conditional Assignments
C# 14 adds null-conditional assignment, a feature that safely assigns values to properties or indexers without long chains of if statements.
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Pitfalls of Safe Rust
When people say Rust is a “safe language”, they often mean memory safety. And while memory safety is a great start, it’s far from all it takes to build robust applications. Memory safety is necessary but not sufficient for overall reliability. In thi…
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Four Years of Jai (2024)
I’ve been programming for long enough to be righteously cantankerous about a lot of things. The list of languages, frameworks and libraries I’ve worked with professionally or on personal projects is too long to list – but it includes everything from C and assembly languages through C++, Pascal and Delphi, through Java…
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How does Ada's memory safety compare against Rust?
A comparison of how well Rust and Ada prevent the most common memory-related software errors.
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Project Verona: Fearless Concurrency for Python
Research programming language for concurrent ownership
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Carbon is not a programming language (sort of)
Within C++, there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out.
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JVM exceptions are weird: a decompiler perspective
Some time ago, I played around with decompiling Java class files in a more efficient manner than traditional solutions like Vineflower allow. Eventually, I wrote an article on my approach to decompiling control flow, which was a great performance boost for my prototype. At the time, I believed that this method can be…