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Swift's native Clocks are inefficient
In absolute terms they don’t have much overhead – think sub-microsecond for most uses. Which makes them perfectly acceptable when they’re used sporadically (e.g. only a few times per second).
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,540 posts.
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Regular expression matching can be simple and fast (2007)
This is a tale of two approaches to regular expression matching. One of them is in widespread use in the standard interpreters for many languages, including Perl. The other is used only in a few places, notably most implementations of awk and grep. The two approaches have wildly different performance characteristics:
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Object-Oriented Entity-Component-System Design
About two months ago, I decided to start developing a fresh codebase for my voxel project – something that many indie developers are probably all-too familiar with, including myself. This time around, there were three major features that I wanted to implement:
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Jax vs. Julia (Vs PyTorch)
A while ago there was an interesting thread on the Julia Discourse about the “state of machine learning in Julia”. I posted a response discussing the differences between Julia and Python (both JAX and PyTorch), and it seemed to be really well received! Since then this topic seems to keep coming up, so I thought I’d…
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A reasonable configuration language
I was fed up with the poor opportunities for abstraction in configuration formats. The many configuration languages that exist already were not invented here, so I wrote my own, at first just for fun. But then it became useful.
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Write an SQL query builder in 150 lines of Python
This is the fourth article in a series about writing my own SQL query builder. Today, we'll rewrite it from scratch, explore API design, learn when to be lazy, and look at worse and better ways of doing things – all in 150 lines of Python!
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C++20 Concepts: The Definitive Guide
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Dammit, MySQL
Update May 2018: This is more rant-ish than I would write now, but it’s my only post to hit the front page of HackerNews (it got to the number 2 spot back in 2010; I saved screenshots), so has a soft-place in my heart.
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T-Wand: beating Lucene in less than 600 lines of code
The design of Datalevin's compact Clojure search engine, its T-Wand algorithm, and the full-text search benchmarks comparing it with Apache Lucene.
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Feature Flags: Theory vs. Reality
A contemplation of how feature management tools might evolve to better support how feature flags are used in practice
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The Dynamic Def – abusing Ruby's def statement
Algorithms, circle mazes, hex grids, masking, weaving, braiding, 3D and 4D grids, spheres, and more!
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i386 Assembly Language trick for storing data in .text
Don’t want a big old bloated multi-kilobyte executable with a data segment, but you do need to store some data?
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Software Friction
In his book On War, Clausewitz defines friction as the difference between military theory and reality: Thus, then, in strategy everything is very simple, but not on that account very easy. Everything is very simple in war, but the simplest thing is difficult. These difficulties accumulate and produce a friction, which…
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Hard Mode Rust (2022)
This post is a case study of writing a Rust application using only minimal, artificially constrained API (eg, no dynamic memory allocation). It assumes a fair bit of familiarity with the language.
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Safe Native Code
Joe Duffy's Blog | Adventures in the high-tech underbelly
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Ideal divisors: when a division compiles down to just a multiplication
The division instruction is one of the most expensive instruction in your CPU. Thus optimizing compilers often compile divisions by known constants down to a multiplication followed by a shift. However, in some lucky cases, the compiler does not even need a shift. I call the corresponding divisors ideal. For the math…
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Towards a new SymPy
This is the first part of a series of posts on big changes for SymPy with particular focus on speed. What I am going to describe in these posts are:
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Murder Mystery: GCC builds failing after sbuild refactoring
This is the story of an investigation conducted by Jochen Sprickerhof, Helmut Grohne, and myself. It was true teamwork, and we would have not reached the bottom of the …
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Wield Python's super() like a Jedi
If you aren’t wowed by Python’s super() builtin, chances are you don’t really know what it is capable of doing or how to use it effectively. Much has been written about super() and much of that wri…
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I Wrote a Scheme in 2025
One year minus one week ago to the day I published an article announcing the new Scheme implementation I was writing, scheme-rs . Today I am excited to announce that scheme-rs has reached its first version, 0.1.0 . You can check it out at it’s website ( scheme-rs.org , which should be updated to scheme.rs at some…
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Claude Code vs. Codex: I built a sentiment dashboard from Reddit comments
I scraped hundreds of Reddit comments that compare Claude Code and Codex, and used Claude Haiku to build a sentiment analysis dashboard. The dashboard and my interpretations are shared here.