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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,020 posts.
The opcache PHP extension implements various functionality to speed up PHP in a transparent manner. As the name indicates, its origin and primary purpose is opcode caching, but nowadays it also contains an optimizer and just-in-time compiler. However, this blog post will focus only on the opcode caching aspect.
So we’re supposed to be writing a game, right? But in order to make progress, we have to fix a bug. And in order to fix the bug, we have to write a test. And in order to write a test, we have to write a test framework. And in order to write a test framework, we have to understand a thing or two about macros. Okay. So…
What is Stripe’s product culture like? Interview with a Stripe product leader demonstrate an embrace of going deep, moving fast, and maintaining a multi-decade perspective.
How I decided to write a spellchecker and almost died trying
Keynote at 15th ACM International Conference on Distributed and Event-based Systems (DEBS) , Online (originally planned to be in Milan, Italy), July 2021.
You may have heard that TypeScript has been taking the web development space by storm in the last few years , bringing to it static types. I believe the same thing is starting to happen in the world of Python, where type checkers like mypy , Pyre , and Pyright are increasingly used, at least where Python is used by…
The C strcpy function is a common sight in typical C programs. It’s also a source of buffer overflow defects, so linters and code reviewers commonly recommend alternatives such as strncpy (difficult to use correctly; mismatched semantics), strlcpy (non-standard, flawed ), or C11’s optional strcpy_s ( no correct or…
Meson's Xcode backend was originally written in 2014 or so and was never complete or even sufficiently good for daily use. The main reason f...
If you have any question or suggestions about this tutorial, please file them as issues here .
I’ve been using Go for a few years now, mostly in my open source project Lazygit. In my day job I use Ruby and Typescript, and I’ve also spent some time with Rust. Each of those languages have design quirks that can grind a developer’s gears, and although my own precious gears have been ground by every language I’ve…
Texts on this and that.
C++20 added minimal support for coroutines. I think they’re done in a way that really doesn’t fit into C++, mostly because they don’t follow the zero-overhead principle. Calling a…
First there was REST, then GraphQL made RPC cool again, but maybe we need to come full circle with SQL over HTTP.
Sure, we all pretend to know them, but rarely do we think they apply to us. Your manager certainly doesn't...
Yes, I am aware that I am interrupting our self-hosting PL/0 compiler series but I think it will be worth it. Earlier today, I got the J language system running on OpenBSD . I find it important to write these up, because it helps me preserve my own knowledge of what I did and hopefully it will help others porting…
A simple intuitive breakdown of fluid simulation for programmers and technical artists. Instead of complicated mathematical expressions, I…
On every team at every company I've been at prior to my current role, the advice was simple: don't check your node_modules folder into your version control system (which I'll refer to as “Git” for the rest of this article…). This seemed like solid advice for multiple reasons:
An unfair heavily biased apples-to-oranges comparison… unless?
More than 600 new functions in Version 13 plus loads of updates covering: symbolic integration, mathematical functions, PDE modeling, video creation, image stitching, tree constructs, graph coloring, subgraph isomorphism, spatial fields, leap seconds, maps, geometric regions, chemical formulas & reactions, bio…
A while ago, I was curious how the speed of document.getElementById compared to document.querySelector in Javascript for selecting a single element by ID. querySelector has to do a lot more work, so one would expect that it would be slower, but I didn't know if the difference was enough to care about.
Lately I’ve been experimenting with Rust, and I want to report some of whatI’ve learned about thread-safety. I am an enthusiastic dabbler in Rust: Ispend mo...
After working through “the book” on the Rust programming language and getting started with the first non-trivial, real-world application I found myself faced with a question I didn’t yet feel well-equipped to handle: “How should you structure error handling in a mature rust application?”
A blog about programming, technology and open-source stuff.
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…
Notes on rethinking browsers
