661
Go Interfaces, the Tricky Parts
Does this Go snippet compile, and if not, why?
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 874 posts.
662
NASM Tutorial (2018)
This tutorial will show you how to write assembly language programs on the x86-64 architecture.
663
Formatting Is Unreasonably Expensive for Embedded Rust
As a (late) part of the #rust2020 request, I wanted to talk about one of the paper-cuts that has become decently problematic for new and experienced users of Embedded Rust: The size costs of formatting in Rust today are unreasonably expensive for users of Rust on bare metal embedded systems. In particular there are…
664
Apply Unix Principles to Write Testable Microservices
Microservice architecture paradigm fits well within the Unix’s first principle/philosophy: “Make one program do one thing well”. We l...
665
Programming Algorithms: A Crash Course in Lisp
The introductory post for this book, unexpectedly, received quite a lot of attention, which is nice since it prompted some questions, and on...
666
An Introduction to Vectorization
Your CPU has a 32-bit addition instruction that computes the sum of two 32-bit integers x and y, producing a 32-bit result. (The 33rd bit of the sum, the "carry bit", is usually thrown away.)
667
Rust async-await status report 2
I wanted to give an update on the status of the “async-await foundations” working group. This post aims to cover three things:
668
669
670
Technical Debt Is Like Tetris
You can’t win. You can only control how quickly you lose.
671
672
Race Condition vs. Data Race (2011)
It’s terribly punny/dorky of me, but reading your post it just occurred to me one could start a blog called “Race Condition” about being a person of color and being a computer scientist.
673
674
Ways to break your systems code using volatile (2010)
Regarding the example #5, I must be confused about the definition of a sequence point because the resulting assembly output seems to be non-ANSI C:
675
Generalized Knights
Knights in chess move in an L-shape: 2 squares in one direction and 1 square perpendicular. But what if it didn't have to be like that?
676
At Dynamicland, the Building Is the Computer
Dynamicland is a non-profit that resides somewhere between an academic research lab and a Silicon Valley startup, between physical and digital, and between computing’s distant past and its future.
677
678
Git-subtrac: all your Git submodules in one place
Long ago, I wrote git-subtree to work around some of my annoyances with git submodules. I've learned a lot since then, and the development e...
679
A Fairly Fast Fibonacci Function
A common example of recursion is the function to calculate the $n$-th Fibonacci number: def naive_fib(n): if n < 2: return n else: return naive_fib(n-1) + naive_fib(n-2) This follows the mathematical definition very closely but it’s performance is terrible: roughly $\mathcal{O}(2^n)$. This is commonly patched up with…
680
Concurrency in Python: CSP and Coroutines
Communicating Sequential Processes and Python coroutines as a structured approach to concurrency.
681
Faster arithmetic by flipping signs
Over the years, I picked up a number of tricks to optimize code. Today I’ll talk about one of them.
682
Let the callers of your API control allocations
This is a post about performance. Most of the time when worrying about the performance of a piece of code the overwhelming advice should be (with apologies to Brendan Gregg) don’t worry about it, yet. However there is one area where I counsel developers to think about the performance implications of a design, and that…
683
Software Is Hard (2007)
"Software is hard," reads the quote from Donald Knuth that opens Scott Rosenberg's Dreaming in Code . The 400 pages that follow examine why: Why is software in a never-ending state of crisis? Why do most projects end up horribly over-budget or cancelled or both? Why can't we ship code without bugs? Why, everyone asks…
684
685
Architecting UIs for Change
Techniques for keeping your app code under control even when requirements shift dramatically.
686
Clever Functional Design
An entry on some of the cleverest (and clearest) functional designs I've worked on, and how it came to be
687
Unintuitive JSON Parsing
Despite the goal of JSON being a subset of JavaScript — which it failed to achieve (update: this was fixed ) — parsing JSON is quite unlike parsing a programming language. For invalid inputs, the specific cause of error is often counter-intuitive. Normally this doesn’t matter, but I recently ran into a case where it…
688
Lock-free multithreading with atomic operations
Synchronizing threads at a lower level.
689
690
High-performance, exactly-once, failure-oblivious distributed programming (2018)
This is one post in a series about programming models and languages for distributed computing that I’m writing as part of my history of distributed programming techniques.Relevant ReadingTrill: A h...