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

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2169

Changing the Rules of Rust

In Rust, there are certain API decisions about what is and isn’t sound that impact all Rust code. That is, a decision was made to allow or not allow types which have certain safety requirements, and now all users are committed to that decision. They can’t just use a different API with different rules: all APIs must…

2171

WTF is going on with R7RS Large?

The reaction to John Cowan’s resignation as chair of the R 7 RS Large working group has been somewhat wider than I think anyone expected, making it onto general interest programming forums. Scheme may be a small island, but when it has an earthquake, it makes waves through the whole archipelago of programming…

2177

Clojure’s Approach to Identity and State (2008)

Many people come to Clojure from an imperative language and find themselves out of their element when faced with Clojure’s approach to doing things, while others are coming from a more functional background and assume that once they leave Clojure’s functional subset, they will be faced with the same story re: state as…

2178

Fitting a FORTH in 512 bytes

Software is full of circular dependencies if you look deep enough. Compilers written in the language they compile are the most obvious example, but not the only one. To compile a kernel, you need a running kernel. Linkers, build systems, shells. Even text editors, if you want to write the code instead of just…

2179

C++ Coroutine Theory (2017)

In this post I will describe the differences between functions and coroutines and provide a bit of theory about the operations they support. The aim of this post is introduce some foundational concepts that will help frame the way you think about C++ Coroutines.