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

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12402

Decoding UTF8 with parallel extract

As a side-quest I recently decided to write a branchless utf8 decoder utilizing the pext or "parallel extract" instruction. It's compliant with rfc-3629 , meaning that it doesn't just naively decode the code-point but also checks for overlong encoding, surrogate pairs and such. Compiled with gcc -O3 -march=x86-64-v3…

12403

The Computer Graphics Library

Back in the 90s, one book was ubiquitous in the world of Computer Graphics. Commonly called "The CG Bible", Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice gathered a huge part of the knowledge of the time. It was commonly referenced by the best programmers of that era in interviews and articles . By 1998, the book…

12408

Modern Perl, the book, is Available.

After countless commits, the generosity of dozens of proofreaders, and far too long proofreading the index, Modern Perl: the book is available! You can buy a lovely print version from any well-stocked online vendor (and you're more than welcome to...

12413

Bit Hacking (with Go code)

At a fundamental level, a programmer needs to manipulate bits. Modern processors operate over data by loading in 'registers' and not individual bits. Thus a programmer must know how to manipulate the bits within a register. Generally, we can do so while programming with 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit and 64-bit integers. For…

12419

Clojure Zippers (2021)

In this article, we will discuss zippers in the Clojure language. These are an unusual way to work with collections. Using a zipper, you can traverse a data structure arbitrarily and modify its content as well as search in it. A zipper is a powerful abstraction that pays off over time. However, it is not as…