Topics /

Programming Languages

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

Any year
211

Clojure.spec – Rationale and Overview

Clojure is a dynamic language. Among other things this means that type annotations are not required for code to run. While Clojure has some support for type hints, they are not an enforcement mechanism, nor comprehensive, and are limited to communicating information to the compiler to aid in efficient code generation…

213

PHP 8

PHP is a popular general-purpose scripting language that powers everything from your blog to the most popular websites in the world.

216

Elixir for cynical curmudgeons

You are seeing this because the administrator of this website has set up Anubis to protect the server against the scourge of AI companies aggressively scraping websites . This can and does cause downtime for the websites, which makes their resources inaccessible for everyone.

217

Static types in Python

Over the last few years, static type checkers have become available for popular dynamic languages like PHP (Hack) and JavaScript (Flow and TypeScript), and have seen wide adoption. Two years ago, a provisional syntax for static type annotations was added to Python 3. However, static types in Python …

218

Zig's comptime is bonkers good

Programming has obvious abilities to increase productivity through automated manipulation of data. Metaprogramming allows code to be treated as data, turning programming’s power back onto itself. Programming close to the metal has perhaps the most to gain from metaprogramming as high level concepts need to be mapped…

225

A Design Space Exploration of Async/Await

Every language pitches async/await as synchronous-looking code, and the same two keywords appear everywhere. But behind the shared syntax hide nine independent design decisions, and no two of seven modern runtimes agree on what even the simplest async programs should do! In this paper we map the design space of…

226

SectorC: A C Compiler in 512 bytes

SectorC ( github ) is a C compiler written in x86-16 assembly that fits within the 512 byte boot sector of an x86 machine. It supports a subset of C that is large enough to write real and interesting programs. It is quite likely the smallest C compiler ever written.

227

Implications of Rewriting a Browser Component in Rust

Since our first release in 2002, there have been 69 security bugs in Firefox’s style component. If we'd had a time machine and could have written this component in Rust from the start, 51% wouldn't have happened. That said, Rust is not foolproof. Developers still need to be aware of correctness bugs and data leakage…

231

Getting Past C

One of the medium-term possibilities we’re seriously considering forNTPsec is moving the entire codebase out of C into a language with nobuffer overrun...

238

Translating Quake 3 into Rust

The Rust-loving team at Immunant has been hard at work on C2Rust, a migration framework that takes the drudgery out of migrating to Rust. Our goal is to make safety improvements to the translated Rust automatically where we can, and help the programmer do the same where we cannot. First, however, we have to build a…