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Software Engineering

The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 808 posts.

2018
65

Inheritance Often Doesn't Make Sense

There are three different types of inheritance going on. Ontological inheritance is about specialisation: this thing is a specific variety of that thing (a football is a sphere and it has this radius) Abstract data type inheritance is about substitution: this thing behaves in all the ways that thing does and has this…

70

How I Wrote a Modern C++ Library in Rust

Since version 56, Firefox has had a new character encoding conversion library called encoding_rs. It is written in Rust and replaced the old C++ character encoding conversion library called uconv that dated from early 1999. Initially, all the callers of the character encoding conversion library were C++ code, so the…

74

Postgres 11 – A First Look

Postgres 11 is almost here, in fact the latest beta shipped today, and it features a lot of exciting improvements. If you want to get the full list of features it is definitely worth checking out the release notes, but for those who don’t read the release notes I put together a run down of some what I consider the…

76

Functional core, imperative shell (2012)

Purely functional code makes some things easier to understand: because values don't change, you can call functions and know that only their return value matters—they don't change anything outside themselves. But this makes many real-world applications difficult: how do you write to a database, or to the screen? In…

77

Async and Await in Rust: a full proposal

I’m really excited to announce the culmination of much of our work over the last four months: a pair of RFCs for supporting async & await notation in Rust. This will be very impactful for Rust in the network services space. The change is proposed as two RFCs: RFC #2394: which adds async & await notation to the…

85

Web application from scratch, part I

This is the first in a series of posts in which I'm going to go through the process of building a web application (and its web server) from scratch in Python. For the purposes of this series, I'm going to solely rely on the Python standard library and I'm going to ignore the WSGI standard.

90

Minimalist C Libraries

In the past year I’ve written a number of minimalist C libraries, particularly header libraries. The distinction for “minimalist” is, of course, completely arbitrary and subjective. My definition in this context isn’t about the library’s functionality being stupidly trivial or even necessarily simple. I’m talking…