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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,116 posts.
Talk is cheap, show me the code Introduction A common problem my friends and I have is receiving actionable emails whose priorities are medium level. They do require action of some sort ($ \geq lowest\ priority$), but the action is due in the near future ($\leq highest\ priority$). I tend to skim over these emails…
If you've ever used the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) then you've worked with the gcc binary. For those who don't know, gcc is a driver, not a compiler. It runs the compiler/assembler/linker as required and coordinates the input and output between them. Use of the driver is so ubiquitous that everyone calls it the…
This post intends to provide a brief overview of the algorithm described in Luc Maranget’s “ Compiling Pattern Matching to Good Decision Trees ”.
Demystifying git submodules by showing exactly how they work.
As I'm exploring the fantastic world of indie game development lately, I end up watching a large number of video tutorials on the subject. Even though the quality of the content is pretty variable, I'm very grateful to the creators for it. That being said, I couldn't help noticing this particular bit times and times…
The following is a loose collection of thoughts that came up while porting unsafe-libyaml to safe, idiomatic Rust, which may be useful to someone else who is considering "rewriting it in Rust", as the ancient journeyman prayer goes.
T here is a wide range of input mechanisms for computers, starting with keyboards (which are relatively mature) and extending to various types of neural interfaces (currently under research). Speech lies somewhere on this spectrum with a lot of promises but still not much to show for. Keeping accessibility aspects…
There are a couple of version control commands that deserve wider appreciation: SCCS what and RCS ident . They allow you to find out what source a binary was built from, without having to run it – handy if it is a library! They basically scan a file looking for magic strings that contain version control metadata and…
In my off time (and my on time, for that matter) I've been working on this quirky thing I've called Scinamalink (sounds like 'skinamarink'). Scinamalink lets customers send Magic login links to their users with a single REST API call. If you don't know what a magic
Docker Compose solves real problems in getting applications deployed. It causes problems when deploying many applications. We can do better.
The people who live in a Golden Age usually go around complaining how yellow everything looks. – Randall Jarrell
If there’s two sources of truth, one is probably wrong. And yes, please repeat yourself.
When a service fails to start up enough times in a row, systemd gives up on it. On servers, this isn’t what I want — in general it’s helpful for automated recovery if daemons are restarted indefinitely. As long as you don’t have circular dependencies between services, all your services will eventually come up after…
Just like CAD didn't make everyone an industrial designer, visual programming isn't going to make everyone a programmer. Whether textual or visual, there'd still be a lot of underlying concepts (and how they are composed) to learn. But still, I think it's underexplored. Most visual programming paradigms focus on…
While trying to build my Age Apple Secure Enclave plugin , a small Swift CLI app, on Alpine Linux , I realized that the Swift toolchain doesn’t run on Alpine Linux. The upcoming Swift 6 will support (cross-)compilation to a static (musl-based) Linux target, but I suspect an Alpine Linux version of Swift itself isn’t…
There are lots of interesting little subproblems in compilation like instruction selection, register allocation and instruction scheduling. These can be expressed in declarative interlinked way to constraint solvers.
wrenfold is a framework for converting symbolic mathematical expressions (written in Python) into generated numerical code in other languages (C++, Rust, Python). It aims to bridge the gap between prototyping of functions in expressive symbolic form, and performant production code. wrenfold is particularly relevant to…
I am a front-end developer who is FED up about front-end development. If you write front-end, this isn't about you personally. It's about how your choices make me angry. Also this is about how my choices have made me angry. Also this is mostly just about choices, the technologies are incidental. Note: The views…
chordcat is a chord-naming application and a pet project of mine. It is written in C++ and SFML.
I’ve noticed a small but interesting trend in the programming languages space. I’m not sure how novel it is, but this pattern, which I’ll refer to as “biphasic programming,” is characterized by languages and frameworks that enable identical syntax to express computations executed in two distinct phases or environments…
A guy decides to show off his Neovim setup.
Successful software is buggy software.
Rust compilation times is an ongoing topic that generates many discussions online1. Most people don’t really care about what exactly takes time when compiling Rust program; they just want it to be faster in general. But sometimes, you can see people pointing fingers at specific culprits, like LLVM or the borrow…
This will be the first in a series of posts describing different design decisions made writing two Rust crates:
After almost two years of work, we are happy to announce the release of Xfce 4.20.
After writing my thoughts on github3.py down here, someone was asking about Python libraries that people recommend new Python developers read for learning how to structure code and use the packaging systems. My initial reaction was "Don't listen to folks that tell you to read python-requests as a good example." When…
