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On Interviewing Programmers
I'll be looking for a new job soon, readers! And this has been cause for some reflection. In Emeryville, CA, there is an "international...
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 994 posts.
902
Bits of History, Words of Advice
"Why do you jackasses use these inferior linguistic vehicles when we have something here that’s so precious, so elegant, which gives me so ...
903
Yes Silver Bullet (2019)
Since Fred Brooks published his essay, I believe that we, contrary to his prediction, have witnessed several silver bullets.
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Translation Units Considered Harmful?
area being the function you really care about it is defined first - after all, code reads from top to bottom.
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Writing an Efficient Vulkan Renderer
In 2018, I wrote an article “Writing an efficient Vulkan renderer” for GPU Zen 2 book, which was published in 2019. In this article I tried to aggregate as much information about Vulkan performance as I could - instead of trying to focus on one particular aspect or application, this is trying to cover a wide range of…
907
A simple way to get more value from tracing
A lot of people seem to think that distributed tracing isn't useful, or at least not without extreme effort that isn't worth it for companies smaller than FB. For example, here are a couple of public conversations that sound like a number of private conversations I've had. Sure, there's value somewhere, but it costs…
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The Liskov Substitution Principle (2019)
In 1987, while delivering a keynote on data abstractions and hierarchies, Barbara Liskov introduced the idea that would eventually become the Liskov Substitu...
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What Is the Minimal Set of Optimizations Needed for Zero-Cost Abstraction?
Robert O'Callahan. Christian. Kiwi. Software guy. All content human-authored unless otherwise noted.
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Tools I use: argparse builder
argparse builder is a web based graphical interface for quick creation of the argparse commandline switches for your python scripts.
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Rust for JavaScript Developers – Pattern Matching and Enums
Part 4 covers pattern matching, destructuring, and enums
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Computation Graphs and Graph Computation
Research has begun to reveal many algorithms can be expressed as matrix multiplication, suggesting an unrealized connection between linear algebra and computer science. I speculate graphs are the missing piece of the puzzle. Graphs are not only useful as cognitive aides, but are suitable data structures for a wide…
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Everything Is an X
Analysis and examples of the popular high-level pattern of making all the things in your system conform to a common interface.
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Types as axioms, or: playing god with static types
A common perspective is that types are restrictions . Static types restrict the set of values a variable may contain, capturing some subset of the space of “all possible values.” Under this worldview, a typechecker is sort of like an oracle, predicting which values will end up where when the program runs and making…
918
Three Types of Data
In my work I’ve developed a mental framework related to data modeling, which has helped greatly both when coming up with a model and when making decisions down the road about how to use that model. Here I will establish three different categories of data in software: Constants, State, and Cached Values. By “data” I…
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Does C++ still deserve a bad rap?
Traditionally C++ has been seen by many (and you know who you are) as just plain bad: the code is unreadably verbose, error messages are und...
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The lack of namespaces on crates.io is a feature
Rust doesn’t have namespaces in its package management system. It’s often viewed as a bug. But it’s not a bug, it’s a feature! While there are negative aspects of a flat package registry, there are also real benefits. Stability, continuity, and unity (discourages forks and fragmented identity)…
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Computer science is not software engineering
Wow, college was such a waste of time ... when did you ever invert a binary tree outside of an interview? Honestly I never inverted a binary tree in college either ☹️
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In CPython, types implemented in C are part of the type tree
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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Writing a DSL in Lua (2015)
DSLs, or domain specific languages, are programming languages that are designed to implement a set of features specific to a particular problem or field. An example could be Make , the build tool, which is a specially designed language for combining ...
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A New Back End for Cranelift: Instruction Selection
This post is the first in a three-part series about my recent work on Cranelift as part of my day job at Mozilla. In this first post, I will set some context and describe the instruction selection problem. In particular, I'll talk about a revamp to the instruction selector and backend framework in general that we've…
927
My Beef with RuboCop
Consider a hypothetical class that filters out unsafe HTML elements:
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Typed Lisp, a Primer (2019)
Exploring Lisp's fine-grained type hierarchy.
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Emacs Lisp Animations
Emacs , a programmer's text editor with roots in the 1970s, is a great tool for animation. In Fall, 2010 I taught a digital art class at NYU's interdisciplinary Steinhardt art school. Clearly, the thing to do was to teach how to make animations in Emacs by programming it in Lisp.
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Shipping Const Generics in 2020
It’s hard to believe that its been more than 3 years since I opened RFC 2000 , which defined the const generics for Rust. At the same time, reading the RFC thread, there’s also been a huge amount of change in this area: for one thing, at the time the RFC was written, const fns weren’t stable, and consts weren’t even…