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The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 5,634 posts.
Beautiful ideas in programming: generators and continuations
Science, programming, books, and other interesting stuff
Kotlin 1.0.5 is here
We're happy to announce that we've just released Kotlin 1.0.5, which continues the series of bugfix and tooling updates for Kotlin 1.0. We'd like to thank our external contributors whose pull request
//go:fix inline and the source-level inliner
How Go 1.26's source-level inliner works, and how it can help you with self-service API migrations.
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.
Why we write elementary apps in Vala (2014)
A tremendously effective tool for our needs
What causes Ruby memory bloat?
Ruby apps can use a lot of memory. But why? Various people in the community attribute it to memory fragmentation, and provide two “hacky” solutions. Dissatisfied by the current explanations and provided solutions, I set out on a journey to discover the deeper truth and to find better solutions.
Rust's unsafe pointer types need an overhaul
I literally wrote the book on unsafe Rust . And the book on pointers in Rust . And redesigned the Rust’s pointer APIs . And designed the standard library’s abstraction for unsafe heap-allocated buffers . And maintain the alternative Vec layout .
Introducing the Python Language Server
Visual Studio has long been recognized for the quality of its IntelliSense (code analysis and suggestions) across all languages, and has had support for
What is Hindley-Milner and why is it cool? (2008)
Anyone who has taken even a cursory glance at the vast menagerie of programming languages should have at least heard the phrase "Hindley-Milner". F#, one of the most promising languages ever to emerge from the forbidding depths of Microsoft Research, makes use of this mysterious algorithm, as do Haskell, OCaml and ML…
Single File Elixir Scripts
Experiment and debug with Elixir Scripts!
Teach Yourself Scheme in Fixnum Days (2015)
A practical introduction to the programming language Scheme
An Experimental New Type Inference Scheme for Rust
While on vacation, I’ve been working on an alternate type inference scheme for rustc. (Actually, I got it 99% working on the plane, and have been slowly poking at it ever since.) This scheme simplifies the code of the type inferencer dramatically and (I think) helps to meet our intutions (as I will explain). It is…
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, …
R, the master troll of statistical languages (2012)
Warning: what follows is a somewhat technical discussion of my love-hate relationship with the R statistical language, in which I somehow manage to waste 2,400 words talking about a single line of …
What Made Lisp Different (2002)
(This article came about in response to some questions on the LL1 mailing list. It is now incorporated in Revenge of the Nerds .) When McCarthy designed Lisp in the late 1950s, it was a radical departure from existing languages, the most important of which was Fortran . Lisp embodied nine new ideas:
Python 3 in 2016
My completely anecdotal view on the state of Python 3 in 2016. Based on my own recent experience, observations, and exchanges with other members of the Python community.
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…
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.
Rambling On [PHP] Internals
This is a post that I didn’t want to write. Actually, it’s a post that I still don’t want to write. But I find myself in a situation where I feel that I have to say something. So I’m going to just ope
Visual Basic Turns 25
That’s right! Today marks the 25th (“Silver Anniversary”) since VB first debuted to the world. It seems like just yesterday I’d only been at Microsoft a little over a year when VB turned 20. Looking back at the progress of 5 years—a complete revamp of the IDE and debugger, a trove of new language features, […]
IntelliJ IDEA and the whole IntelliJ platform migrates to Java 8
If you've already tried IntelliJ IDEA 16 EAP announced last week, you'll be glad to know that we've just released a new build.With this build IntelliJ IDEA and the whole IntelliJ platform migrates
Nim version 2.0.0 release candidate
The first release candidate for Nim version 2.0 is ready for testing.
Working with Errors in Go 1.13
How to use the new Go 1.13 error interfaces and functions.