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An Interview with the Old Man of Floating-Point (1998)
This interview underlies an abbreviated version to appear in the March 1998 issue of IEEE Computer .
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,020 posts.
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Programming War Stories: macOS Freeware/Shareware (2019)
Aaron Giles is a Seattle-area programmer, musician, web developer, and graphic designer.
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Let's build a simple interpreter for APL, part 2 (2020)
Today is the day! Today is the day we take our APL programs and interpret them, so that something like ÷ 1 2 3 -⍨ 1.1 2.2 3.3 can output 10 5 3.33333333.
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Native-like Navigation of Web apps
Native-like Navigation for Web apps
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A Tour of Safe Tracing GC Designs in Rust
I’ve been thinking about garbage collection in Rust for a long time, ever since I started working on Servo’s JS layer. I’ve designed a GC library, …
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Async Cancellation
Sometimes we start things but decide midway through that we would prefer to rather not be doing them. That process is sometimes referred to as cancellation. Say we accidentally clicked "download" on a large file in the browser. We should have a way to tell the computer to stop downloading it.
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Distributing unnotarized Mac apps in a text file
This isn't a late April Fools joke. (My April Fools joke that I got hired by Apple as a Swift Evangelist backfired with a profusion of congratulations.) This blog post is a kind of follow-up to some previous blog posts. Last month I wondered what's the best way to distribute Mac apps without notarization , and I…
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Rust 1.x seems to not always be backward compatible in practice
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…
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How much can a Clojure developer do alone?
A response to a developer weighing Clojure's benefits, explaining the REPL workflow through human-computer interaction and reflecting on individual productivity.
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Namedtuple in a Post-Dataclasses World
namedtuple has been around since forever, and over time, its convenience saw it used far outside its originally intended purpose. With dataclasses now covering part of those use cases, what should one use named tuples for? In this article, I address this question, and give a few examples from real code.
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A Universal I/O Abstraction for C++ (2020)
This article is the sequel to A Universal Async Abstraction for C++ , in which I talk about the Executor proposal targeting C++23. Quite a bit happened since then.
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Opinion-Driven Design
Some of my personal thoughts on how we design open source projects
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Ruby on Rails: View Components, Storybook and Tailwind - a match made in heaven?
In this post, I’m going to cover the use of some popular open-source technologies, that when combined together provide an extremely powerful developer experience. This will be orientated towards Rails, but it should be possible to swap out View Components with something else for your stack.
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Faster Mac dev tools with custom allocators
Introduction
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Static Executables with SBCL v2
It's taken me much longer than I hoped, but I finally have a second version of my patches to build static executables tested and ready to go! This set of patches vastly improves upon the first by reducing the amount of compilation needed at the cost of sacrificing a little purity. Additionally I have created a system…
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Writing and publishing a Python module in Rust
This post is a quick walkthrough of how I wrote a Python library, procmaps , in nothing but Rust. It uses PyO3 for the bindings and maturin to manage the build (as well as produce manylinux1 -compatible wheels).
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Writing a Clojure highlighter from scratch
In the aftermath of my previous blog post about using Nextjournal's clojure-mode for better highlighting, I tried optimizing the JS output and got a look at the internals of CodeMirror 6 . I realized that writing a Clojure highlighter from scratch wasn't that hard if you had the right tools at hand:
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Guide: Full Wayland Setup for Linux
This article is a guide for achieving a full-as-possible Wayland setup on Arch Linux. If you follow the entire guide, by the end you will have:
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Stop mocking your system
Yes, mocking has a mostly negative meaning! Only this - to imitate (someone or something) closely - doesn't feel negative.
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Tar is an ill-specified format (2015)
http://invisible-island.net/ autoconf/ Copyright © 2014–2015,2016 by Thomas E. Dickey
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Summary of C/C++ integer rules
This is my own collection of hard-earned knowledge about how integers work in C/C++, and how to use them carefully and correctly. In this article, I try to strike a balance between brevity (easing the reader) and completeness (providing absolute correctness and extensive detail).
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The surprising subtleties of zeroing a register (2012)
Zeroing out a CPU register seems like the simplest and most basic operation imaginable, but in fact x86 CPUs contain a surprising amount of special logic to make this operation run smoothly. The mo…
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Modern software controls dependencies because it helps software authors
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…
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Knuth on Dijkstra (2014)
An excerpt from my book Coders at Work that I frequently find myself wanting to cite mostly because I get a kick out of someone having standing to call BS on Dijkstra:
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Why Specifications Don't Compose
Recently my friend Lars Hupel and I had a discussion on why formal methods don’t compose well. You can read the conversation here. We focused mostly on composing formally-verified code. I want to talk a little more about the difficulties in composing specifications. This is half because it’s difficult for interesting…
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Maybe the spaghetti code conjecture is false
The Spaghetti Code Conjecture says that Busy Beaver programs ought to be, in some sense, as complicated as possible. Scott Aaronson puts it this way:
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Data notation in Clojure
Homoiconicity (code as a data structure) is one of the pillars of the Clojure language. It gives the extensibility and flexibility to the language.