811
Grit: Rewriting Git in Rust with agents
We used agents to port all of Git to library-first, memory-safe Rust and it passes the entire C Git test suite.
Topics /
Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,413 posts.
812
Defeating Git Rigour Fatigue with Jujutsu
The website of Ike Saunders
813
Slightly safer vibecoding by adopting old hacker habits
I have seen a lot of public discussion around supply-chain attacks on the Python ecosystem, prompt injection risks when using coding agents,...
814
When str.lower() is a security vulnerability in Python
Some internet standards only support ASCII characters, but the world uses much more than the Latin alphabet. Thus, a mapping from Unicode to ASCII for use in domain names is required. NamePrep was...
815
Writing a C Compiler, in Zig (2025)
First foray into the Zig programming language
816
Drawgent: Coding agent on a live Excalidraw canvas
Repository drawgent by yanndegat.tngl.sh on Tangled.
817
LLMs as the new high level language
[UPDATE 2026-06-09]: a few months on, I have more misgivings than certainties about this.
818
Extensible Software in the age of LLMs
Solid core + capability-based sandboxes + LLMs = Users with superpowers
819
I hate compilers
You'd think that given the same bytes of input you'd get the same bytes of output. lol. lmao. No, you don't. It's complicated.
820
Writing Efficient C++ Code (2013)
asawicki.info is protected against automated traffic and abuse. This one-time check confirms you are a real visitor — nothing to install.
821
747s and coding agents
Comparing a career flying the 747 and a career coding with AI assistance.
822
Making a GTK application in Haskell, part 1
Floréal Technologies: Open software, French touch, International reach.
823
Writing a Demoscene Intro for the ZX Spectrum
In the late 80s, I spent an embarrassing number of hours hunched over my ZX Spectrum, typing in Sinclair BASIC programs and rudimentary assembler routines copied from magazines, trying to re-create the Amiga crack intros I’d seen round at a friend’s house. Obviously, they never came even slightly close - but now, many…
824
An idiot’s guide to lead optimisation for proteins
Lead optimisation is the step in drug design where you take a molecule that sort of works and try to make it actually work, and it’s arguably the step where most real-world design campaigns succeed or die. Due to the influence of a couple of my pals , I have recently become interested in using machine learning to do…
825
I hate: Programming Wayland applications
If you want to program a graphical application for linux, your primary choices are using either X11 or Wayland. According to Wikipedia, X11 had its first release in 1984. X11 follows a client-server-model. I assume it's because the whole computational environment, was very different back then. If you have a central…
826
Bun 1.4 Rust rewrite is not looking good?
I care about Bun. I have been rooting for it since the initial release in 2022. I switched all my development from Node to Bun. I used it in the development of the Nue framework and now with my new project Hertta .
827
The GitHub wiki is an anti-pattern (2022)
Using the wiki on GitHub makes life more difficult for your users, and you as a maintainer. Use the `/docs` folder and GitHub Pages instead and keep your docs in sync with code
828
C extensions, portability, and alternative compilers
Anyone who's written C knows that full ISO C standard-adhering code is an impractical rarity. Most real world C code out there relies on non-standard behaviors and language extensions to varying extents, and a lot of this isn't for extra features, but just to work around bugs and gaps in different compilers and…
829
830
Sem: New primitive for code understanding – not LSPs, but entities on top of Git
Semantic understanding on top of Git. Diff, blame, impact, log. Functions, not lines.
831
Improved Git Diffs with Delta, Fzf and a Little Shell Scripting
Spotting differences in code is an important part of what we do, Delta is by far the best CLI diff tool I ever used.
832
Pyodide 314.0: Python packages can now publish WebAssembly wheels to PyPI
We are pleased to announce the Pyodide 314.0 release. This release focuses on standardization and packaging, marking a significant milestone in the Python-in-the-browser ecosystem. PEP 783 is Accepted: What Does It Mean? The acceptance of PEP 783: Emscripten packaging marks perhaps the most exciting change in the…
833
C for Rust programmers
Interesting and unexpected details for Rust programmers learning the C programming language.
834
Are LLM merge rates not getting better?
I was reading the metr article on how llm code passes test much more often than it is of mergeable quality . They look at the performance of llm s doing programming when the success criterion is “passes all tests” and compare it to when the success criterion is “would get approved by the maintainer”. Unsurprisingly…
835
836
GitHub New pull request overview page in public preview
On a long pull request, checking what’s blocking often means scrolling past dozens of comments and timeline events just to reach the merge box. And once you’re there, you still…
837
How Complex is my Code?
What code complexity can mean — from Big O notation and Cyclomatic Complexity to the surprising insights psycholinguistics can offer software developers.
838
C++26: Trivial infinite loops are no longer undefined behaviour
Let’s start with a question! Is this program well-defined? 1 2 3 4 int main() { while (true) ; } If you said yes, you’d be wrong — at least before C++26. A while (true); loop with no side effects used to be undefined behaviour. Compilers were free to assume it terminates, and some — Clang in particular — would…
839
Protobuf has LSP support
Buf is proud to announce the first fully-featured, spec-compliant LSP server for Protobuf. The Language Server Protocol is the standard API for integrating language support into your favorite IDE or text editor, such as VSCode, IntelliJ, or Neovim. An LSP server provides the smarts that power go to definition, code…
840
Making geo joins faster with H3 indexes
Using H3 indexes to greatly speed up geospatial SQL Queries. Orders of magnitude improvements can be gained with the right data structures