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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 894 posts.
Zig places importance on the concept of whether an expression is known at compile-time. There are a few different places this concept is used, and these building blocks are used to keep the language small, readable, and powerful.
The hardest program I’ve ever written, once you strip out the whitespace, is 3,835 lines long. That handful of code took me almost a year to write. Granted, that doesn’t take into account the code that didn’t make it. The commit history shows that I deleted 20,704 lines of code over that time. Every surviving line has…
An empirical study on the correctness of formally verified distributed systems Fonseca et al., EuroSys’17 “Is your distributed system bug free?” “I formally verified it!R…
This is an experience report about a gotcha in Go that catches every Go programmer at least once. The following program is extracted from a larger version that caused my co-workers to lose several hours today.
So it’s not that I’ve been quiet and lazy – I was actually busy preparing some releases and hacking on stuff. So here’s an update on what’s been going on and what’s to come.
Mapping strings to things makes sense. You take a meaningful string and you assign it a value. As with most things we do in programming there are many pitfalls to approaching a problem. So, lets explore some of them!
Computers often need random numbers. Most times, random numbers are not actually random... in the sense that they are the output of a mathematical function that is purely deterministic. And it is not even entirely clear what "really random" would mean. It is not clear that we live in a randomized universe... it seems…
This is part one of a series “ Writing a GCC back end ”. The GCC back end is configured in gcc/config.host and the implementation is p...
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
Node string encoding is all over the place. Let's try to straighten out how it works.
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
When I got my brand-new MacBook Pro (late 2016), I was interested in testing out the phenomenal SSD performance I had been reading about, r...
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
While doing evil things with macros and the inline assembler (trying to run a weird test whose purpose is not really relevant) I managed to write a program that caused Visual Studio’s C++ compiler …
Gap buffers are a common data structure for representing a text buffer in a text editor. Emacs famously uses gap buffers — long-standing proof that gap buffers are a perfectly sufficient way to represent a text buffer.
Someone on StackOverflow stumbled onto the strange term “open recursion” and asked what it meant . Since most of the other answers to this online are pretty opaque, I started writing an answer. But then I accidentally wrote a blog post.
Generics in C# are certainly very useful and I find it amazing that we almost didn’t get them:
If you think this is easy, then I think you are missing something. This is hard. You need to know your hardware intimately to figure this one out.
Magpie has reached a strange but neat little milestone on the road from “weird experiment” to “real language”: the type system is now bootstrapped. I’m not aware of any other languages where a statement like that is even meaningful (maybe Typed Scheme ?), much less true , so I’ll try to break that down.
