901
Traits are a local maximum
An expose on Implicits and Local Coherence
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,116 posts.
902
Using gRPC for (local) inter-process communication (2021)
Using a full-featured RPC framework for IPC seems like overkill when the processes run on the same machine. However, if your project anyway exposes RPCs for public APIs or would benefit from a schema-based serialisation layer it makes sense to use only one tool that combines these—also for IPC. Microservices for…
903
Bicameral, Not Homoiconic
Parenthetically Speaking: Articles by Shriram Krishnamurthi
904
Declarative Programming with AI/LLMs
What Is Declarative Programming Broadly speaking, there are two ways to program/instruct a computer to perform a task, they are imperative...
905
Building a full Django project, starting with a single file
MP 90: Building a complete Django project from a single file. Note: This is the first post in a series about building a full Django project, starting with a single file. This series will be free to everyone, as soon as each post comes out. 1 For a long time,
906
Quicksort with Jenkins for fun and no profit
I first encountered Jenkins in 2007 while contributing to the Apache Nutch project. It was called Hudson back then. The nightly builds for the project ran on Hudson at that time. I remember sifting through my emails and reviewing build result notifications to keep an eye on the patches that got merged into the trunk…
907
Fast Shadow Stacks for Go
tl;dr : Software shadow stacks could deliver up to 8x faster stack trace capturing in the Go runtime when compared to the frame pointer unwinding that landed in go1.21. This doesn’t mean that this idea should escape from the laboratory right away, but it offers a fun glimpse into a potential future of hardware…
908
909
Unsafe Rust is harder than C
Or: The Most Expensive Linked List I’ve Ever Written
910
Emacs commands I got by with for years
As far as I know, the next meeting of EmacsATX, the Austin Emacs Meetup group , has a planned topic: Org mode . I was going to make a post about the common Org functions I use frequently, but I thought that I should start with common commands I used for generic Emacs when I started using it more than twenty years ago…
911
Programming book authors: put all the code in the book
tl;dr: programming book authors: put all the code in the book! An extreme antipattern for a programming book is “download the author’s idiosyncratic library code from some random URL an…
912
Floating points between zero and one
floating-points-between-zero-and-one - Chad Nauseam Home
913
Garbage collected smart pointers in Rust via concurrent cycle collection
Scheme to the Spec is a series on the more complex, often overlooked aspects of programming language implementation.
914
Data Fetching for Single-Page Apps
Five patterns to help Single Page Applications fetch data from remote sources
915
Taming floating-point sums
Suppose you have an array of floating-point numbers, and wish to sum them. You might naively think you can simply add them, e.g. in Rust:
916
Zero or Sign Extend
A while back I had to deal with a bit-packed format that contained a list of integer values encoded in one of a pre-defined sets of bit widths, where both the allowed bit widths and the signed-ness…
917
918
Fine, I'll Play With Skiplists
Follow me on Bluesky! A Log-Structured Merge tree, or LSM, is a popular data structure for storage engines. It’s what is used by RocksDB, which is sort of...
919
QEMU AioContext removal and how it was done
This post is about the AioContext lock removal in QEMU 9.0 (planned for release in 2024), how we got here, and what it means for multi-threa...
920
Why it's hard to trust software, but you mostly have to anyway
My long-time collaborator Richard Barnes [1] used to say that "in security, trust is a four letter word" , and yet the dominant experience of using any software-based system—which is, you know, pretty much anything electronic—is trusting the manufacturer. Not only is there no meaningful way to determine what software…
921
Overcoming the limits of current LLMs
Large language models (LLM) have been all the rage for quite some time now. Looking beyond the hype though, they have severe limitations: hallucinations, lack o
922
A beginner's guide to constant-time cryptography (2017)
For programmers new to cryptography, there are plenty of “known unknowns” – unfamiliar terms like “elliptic curves” and “random oracles”, and unnecessarily long acronyms (“RSASSA-PKCS-v1_5”, like really?). But what really gives cryptography its reputation is the unknown unknowns. The things that catch even experienced…
923
A tiny self-remaking C program
In my last post I floated the idea of writing a slow, edit-prone shell script instead as a self-rebuilding C program.
924
Focus by Automation
I’ve invested leisure time to save time when I’m working hard, not to save keystrokes but to save mental energy for the project at hand.
925
Rendering "modern" Winamp skins in the browser
Writing an interpreter for a custom bytecode opens the door for rendering interactive custom Winamp skins in the browser
926
Build a simple LSM-Tree storage engine in a week
A hands-on introduction to database internals. Build an LSM storage engine with SSTables, compaction, WAL recovery, MVCC, and transactions.
927
928
The C++ Killers (Not You, Rust)
All the “C++ killers”, even these which I wholeheartedly love and respect like Rust, Julia, and D, help you write more features with fewer bugs, but they don't much help when you need to squeeze the very last FLOPS from the hardware you rent. As such, they don’t have a competitive advantage over C++. Or, for that…
929
Functional Programming Self-Affirmations
Dmitrii Kovanikov writes posts about enterprise software development and functional programming, both entertaining and serious. I never used a functional programming language (such as Haskell or OCaml) at work, but several ideas from functional programming have become popular in mainstream general-purpose programming…
930
Things I know about Git commits
Some of the things I've learned over a decade of Git usage, and working on writing good commit messages.