Topics /

Software Engineering

The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,001 posts.

2022
398

Extending Python with Rust

Sometimes a pure Python script can't just deliver the performance we need. When that's the case we have to resort to writing our logic in a "fast" compiled language like C or Rust and expose the function with through a Python module. This way we get the best of both worlds. Today I focus on how to use Rust for writing…

403

Why static languages suffer from complexity

People in the programming language design community strive to make their languages more expressive, with a strong type system, mainly to increase ergonomics by avoiding code duplication in final software; however, the more expressive their languages become, the more abruptly duplication penetrates the language itself.

404

A Poor Man's API

Creating a full-fledged API requires resources, both time and money. You need to think about the model, the design, the REST principles, etc., without writing a single line of code. Most of the time, you don’t know whether it’s worth it: you’d like to offer a Minimum Viable Product and iterate from there. I want to…

409

Porting 58k lines of D and C++ to Jai

In this series of blogposts, I will document my experience of porting the game that I am currently working on to the jai programming language. It’s currently written in mostly D and some C++ and comes in at exactly 58,620 lines of code (excluding libraries). I’ve planned on doing this for a long time and want to keep…

411

Using unwrap() in Rust is okay

One day before Rust 1.0 was released, I published a blog post covering the fundamentals of error handling . A particularly important but small section buried in the middle of the article is named “ unwrapping isn’t evil ”. That section briefly described that, broadly speaking, using unwrap() is okay if it’s in…

416

Happy 10th Birthday, Sidekiq

It’s hard for me to believe these words but I pushed Sidekiq’s first commit on Jan 16th, 2012. Ten years ago. The public announcement. One month later. One quarter later. Some context for those new to this blog: Sidekiq is the most popular background job system for the Ruby programming language. Every application has…

419

SimpleDB: A Basic RDBMS Built from Scratch

My databases class at UCLA wasn’t very challenging so I never truly understood the internals of databases. This always bothered me so I vowed to build a simple database from scratch to learn the fundamentals. MIT's Database Systems course has their students implement a simple database from scratch and it provided me…