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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 780 posts.
Many programmers use malloc() and free() and pay no more mind to "allocating memory", but I often find 2-20× speed improvements by rethinking memory usage, so it is something I usually want to examine when joining a distressed project.
So you know a little bit about programming (perhaps you've read the free book, "Invent Your Own Computer Games with Python" , a free programming book for beginners whose author shamelessly plugs at every chance) but you want to get better at coding. You can't seem to find any open source projects that are at your…
In this post I’m going to do a silly, but interesting, exercise that should never be done in any program that actually matters. I’m going write a program that changes one of its function definitions while it’s actively running and using that function. Unlike last time , this won’t involve shared libraries, but it will…
Occasionally I’ve needed to key a hash table with C pointers. I don’t care about the contents of the object itself — especially if it might change — just its pointer identity. For example, suppose I’m using null-terminated strings as keys and I know these strings will always be interned in a common table. These…
My first adventures in parsing theory came when I was doing anindependent study of programming languages in college. When I got tothe part about algorithms s...
Zed Shaw, of Learn Python the Hard Way fame, has now written The Case Against Python 3. I’m not involved with core Python development. The only skin I have in this game is that I like Python 3. It’s a good language. And one of the big factors I’ve seen slowing its adoption is that respected people in the Python commu
Yeah, an in-depth study that repeated another study that was done a few years back. Both showed that TDD doesn’t work. The new one uses a multi-site, blind analysis, approach. It looks conclusive.
This is a tutorial on how to implement a programming language. If you ever wrote an interpreter or a compiler, then there is probably nothing new for you here. But, if you're using regexps to “parse” anything that looks like a programming language, then please read at least the section on parsing . Let's write less…
There’s something missing from the Docker ecosystem: a type-checker.
Update (2023-06-28): Added “I required a file, but I want to know what files were actually loaded” I love puts debugging I am a puts debuggerer. I don’t say this to disparage people that use a Real Debugger. I think Real Debuggers are great, I’ve just never taken the time to learn one well. Every time I try to lean…
This sounds unusual. Who ever wants to do this in real life? Normally, we only see code like this as primary school assignments or compiler benchmarks. However, this time it happened in real life.
Ok, I lied, there’s no weird trick. However, you can easily reduce a Go binary size by more than 6 times with some flags and common tools.
There will come a time when you will find yourself asking “What the heck is that process doing?”. To uncover the mysteries behind the behaviour of a process, we have a tool called strace .
One thing that works well in practice in cases where you really don’t want to process single bytes at a time is to use a union for going from one type to another. Granted, writing one member of a union and reading from a different one also isn’t allowed per the standard, but every compiler I’ve come across allows it…
In this post, you will discover how I used various tools to track down a memory leak in my Python application under Windows!
Bluesky: @simonmar.bsky.social Github: simonmar Email: marlowsd@gmail.com LinkedIn: Simon Marlow
ASDF , the de facto standard build system for Common Lisp, has been vastly improved between 2009 and 2014. These and other improvements finally bring Common Lisp up to par with "scripting languages" in terms of ease of writing and deploying portable code that can access and "glue" together functionality from the…
One smart thing Google does is rigorous code reviews. Every change, before you can land it, gets reviewed in at least two ways. First, someone on the team does a normal review to make sure the code does what it’s supposed to.
