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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,541 posts.
Explore how the Deno runtime can enable JavaScript code execution in a Rust application via a proof-of-concept project called "js-in-rs". Discover the flexibility and versatility of using JavaScript expressions as filters in a CLI, written in Rust, as a powerful alternative to regular expressions. Watch out grep!
A blog about game engines, graphics, C++, and more.
After we published this paper, Matthias Hauswirth kindly pointed out similarities between this work and the PL-detective , a body of work that is very closely related that we did not previously know. Less similar but also related---and entertainingly written up---is smeagol . Since we published the paper, we have…
“Computers are all made out of logic gates”. We’ve heard that saying before. We also have a sense that logic gates are very simple machines, analogous to light switches even. This raises the question: how exactly do kind-of-light-switches come together to form computers ? How does “storing a variable” or “calling a…
Do you remember this exact day, twenty years ago? March 20, 1998. What exactly happened that day? I'll tell you what I did then. First a quick reminder of the state of popular culture at the time: three days later, on the 23rd, the movie Titanic would tangent the record and win eleven academy awards. … Continue…
The trick that makes GHC’s ApplicativeDo optimization faster is structurally identical to how biologists predict RNA folding.
Fellow core developer and Canadian, Mariatta, asked on Twitter about python -m pip and who told her about that idiom along with asking for a reference explaining it: I learned sometime ago that we should be doing `python -m pip install ...` instead of simply `pip install ...` but now I can'
Over the course of four weeks in January and February, I built a new programming language using Claude Code. I named it Cutlet after my cat. It’s completely legal to do that. You can find the source code on GitHub , along with build instructions and example programs .
Programming is a skill in demand. Programming can get you a job. A guide to finding good programmers, Perl and otherwise.
Posted on Hacker News there was an Implementation Plan for making CPython (the official Python implementation) faster. The author claims a 5x speedup is possible for the low cost of $2 million USD.
My friend and I have a game where we talk about what we'd do if we were rich. Not rich like 'paid off the mortgage' rich. Rich like a man who owns a submarine he's never been inside. Rich like a man whose third wife has a skincare
An article from dylanbeattie.net
When I was still researching this fabled obscure language called Lisp one thing people kept saying about it is that “Lisp is a programmable programming language”, but I could never figure out what they meant by that. It sounds like a smug buzzword or like a gimmick from an academic toy language. Lisp programmers have…
A small, cool fact about SQLite is that its columns are flexibly typed. You can store any value in any column! Try it out: sqlite> create table t1 (v1 int, v2 varchar(10)); sqlite> insert into t1 values ("abc", "this string is longer than 10 characters!"); sqlite> select * from t1; abc|this string is longer than 10…
this is an incomplete list of some incompatibilities between c as it's written in the standard and c as it exists in the real world for people who use gcc/clang + glibc/musl.
I have a couple of ideas about learning programming languages. The first is that we do it wrong. I’m sure you’ve experienced this. You try learning a new language and can’t quite see how it all works. Why do I use this syntax here and some other syntax over here? We get frustrated by all the weird bits and go back to…
EDIT: As pointed out in the Rust reddit thread, the Rust version can be modified to run faster due to a suble difference between ..=z and ..(z+1). I’ve updated the measurements with rustc0 be…
Lessons learned from mixins, render props, HOCs, and classes.
SQL by default isn’t typically friendly to dive into, and especially so if you’re reading someone else’s already created queries. For some reason most people throw out principles we follow in other languages such as commenting and composability just for SQL. I was recently reminded of a key feature in Postgres that…
Alex Clemmer is a computer programmer. Other programmers love Alex, excitedly describing him as "employed here" and "the boss's son".
Narrow waists: an idea in software architecture that relates to networking, operating systems, language design, compilers, and distributed systems.
Reading someone else's code can be quite confusing. Hours can go on issues that should have been fixed in minutes. In this article, I would like to share some advice on how to write code that will be easier to understand and maintain.
After being revolutionary in 2007 to unleash CSS selectors that never existed, the specification got abandoned who knows why.
A little context: I got introduced to UML in around 2008, at an employer who had a site licence for Enterprise Architect. I was sent on a training course run by a company that no longer exists called Sun Microsystems: every day for a week I would get on a coach to Marble Arch, then...
