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Software Engineering

The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,357 posts.

2019
692

What causes Ruby memory bloat?

Ruby apps can use a lot of memory. But why? Various people in the community attribute it to memory fragmentation, and provide two “hacky” solutions. Dissatisfied by the current explanations and provided solutions, I set out on a journey to discover the deeper truth and to find better solutions.

694

Reflecting on the Soul of a New Machine

Long ago as an undergraduate, I found myself back home on a break from school, bored and with eyes wandering idly across a family bookshelf. At school, I had started to find a calling in computing systems, and now in the den, an old book suddenly caught my eye: Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine . Taking it off…

695

An x86 Assembler in 256 LOC (2017)

For the first “real” post in this blog, we’ll build an x86 assembler in less than 256 lines of C code. Obviously, it won’t implement every x86 instruction, but it will implement a surprisingly useful subset: data movement, control flow, integer arithmetic, bitwise operations, and function calls. We won’t be able to…

701

Shipping a compiler every six weeks

This blog post is a slightly edited version of the live transcript of the talk I gave at RustFest 2019 in Barcelona on November 10th, 2019. As it's a transcript some parts of it are a bit repetitive or badly worded, but I hope the message behind the talk will be conveyed by this post anyway.

703

Comparisons in C++20

Now that the Cologne meeting is over and we’ve more or less finalized (at least before the NB comments come in) C++20, I wanted to take the time to describe in detail one of the new language features we can look forward to. The feature is typically referred to as operator<=> (defined in the language as “three-way…

705

Performance Tuning for .NET Core

Some of you may know I've been spending whatever time I can scrounge together grinding away at a new serialization library for .NET. Serializers can be complicated beasts. They have to be reliable, flexible, and fast beyond reproach. I won't convince you that serialization libraries have to be quick — in this post…

706

A New R6RS Scheme Compiler

Some readers already know this and a few have suspected. I’ve been working on a new R6RS Scheme compiler for a while. Now I have released it as free software. Read on to learn the many wonderful drawbacks of this niche compiler.