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Programming Languages

The most popular blog posts about programming languages on Hacker News. 384 posts.

2022
213

When rustc explodes

One could say I have a bit of an obsession with build times. I believe having a “tight feedback loop” is extremely valuable: when I work on a large codebase, I want to be able to make small increme...

218

Almost Always Unsigned

Almost Always Unsigned # Written by Dale Weiler Twitter GitHub Last updated Saturday, January 1, 2022 The need for signed integer arithmetic is often misplaced as most integers never represent negative values within a program. The indexing of arrays and iteration count of a loop reflects this concept as well. There…

220

Paving the on-ramp to Java

Java is one of the most widely taught programming languages in the world. Tens of thousands of educators find that the imperative core of the language combined with a straightforward standard library is a foundation that students can comfortably learn on. Choosing Java gives educators many degrees of freedom: they can…

235

Go's Concurrency Examples in Java 19

There is no way for your operating system to know exactly how much stack space a thread will need so it allocates an amount on the order of around a kilobyte initially and then around a megabyte once the thread starts to be used. You only have around a bakers dozen gigabytes of RAM, so you can only have give or take…

239

I Built a Ruby Parser

Sorry, this post will read like a “dear diary” entry rather than some life-changing HN-worthy guidance. Back in November 2020, almost on a whim I started work on a new parser for the Ruby programming language. It was almost exactly a year after I had started working on my compiler project (I hope to write a longer…