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Software Engineering

The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 14,544 posts.

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11255

Implementing Rust's dbg! in Python

Rust has an amazing dbg macro that lets you quickly set up an expression printer that will also put in the source line. It also returns the value of the expression so you can even easily inline the printing when you want to!

11269

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…

11270

Understanding Serde

Serde is one of the most popular Rust crates, and deservedly so. If you aren't familiar, Serde describes itself as "a framework for serializing and deserializing Rust data structures efficiently and generically." What is most impressive to me is how robust the Serde data model has proven to be, allowing it to support…

11275

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…

11280

Quirks of Common Lisp Types

Humans have a tendency toward binary thinking (pardon the pun). If it's not A, it's B. Perhaps because Lisps have REPLs, they are often thought of from the outside as being dynamic, interpreted languages. Our years of Python have taught us that such languages don't really have strong typing - it's all a wild guess…