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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,540 posts.

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5827

Using Zig as cross-platform C toolchain

I like to learn at least one new programming language every year - it’s mostly for fun - they are rarely useful for projects that I actually have to ship . This year, I’ve decided to look at Zig. After skimming through the official documentation and finishing the ray tracing in one weekend exercise, I realize that Zig…

5835

C was not created as an abstract machine

You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…

5836

Why I'm not a React Native developer

Many people are currently assessing React Native as a platform to develop their next mobile app on. This is no trivial matter. Switching your software development platform involves a high setup cost and will profoundly impact your daily programming workflow. It is also one of the costliest decisions to reverse after…

5839

A trick to eliminate 2π (sometimes)

As a physicist, I’ve learned that the presence of 2 π 2\pi 2 π [▼] [ Or rather τ \tau τ , as it should actually be called . ] in a formula usually spells trouble. It’s kind of annoying to write by hand, easy to forget, and it’s dimensionless, so you can’t easily check if you forgot to divide or multiply by it…

5844

Weird Expressions in Rust

Rust has a very powerful type system, but as a result it has some quirks, some would say cursed expressions. There’s a test file, weird-expr.rs , in the rust repository that tests for some of these and makes sure there consistent between updates. So I wanted to go over each of these and explain how it’s valid rust.

5848

Beating the Compiler

In modern times, everyone knows that writing assembly is a fool's errand: compilers are the result of literal engineer-centuries of work, and they know the processor much better than you do.

5849

Unexecute

This here is the epitome of craziness. I could very well give up my search for more scary things in Emacs because I very much doubt I’ll find anything more fear-inducing, but first of all, let’s explain what’s wrong with it. Unlike my previous examples it’s not something I can show you by just pointing at code…