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Software Engineering

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

2019
62

Use mmap with care

When we implemented the git portion of Sublime Merge , we chose to use mmap for reading git object files. This turned out to be considerably more difficult than we had first thought. Using mmap in desktop applications has some serious caveats, and here's why:

67

Modern C, Second Edition

A new edition of the book Modern C and much more are now available under a CC license via the following page This edition is the result of a collaboration with Manning, and improves a lot over the…

71

History and Effective Use of Vim

This article is based on historical research and on simply reading the Vim user manual cover to cover. Hopefully these notes will help you (re?)discover core functionality of the editor, so you can abandon pre-packaged vimrc files and use plugins more thoughtfully.

76

Ten Years of Erlang

For my ten years in the Erlang community, I decided to cover a few topics such as hype phases and how this related to Erlang, the ladder of ideas within the language and how that can impact adoption, what changed in my decade there, and what I think Erlang still has to bring to the programming community at large.

79

Undocumented Catalina file access change

It's well known that if you drag a file from Finder and drop it into Terminal, the full path of the file will output in Terminal. The same behavior occurs with copy and paste too. This has always been a very convenient but innocuous operation… until macOS 10.15 Catalina. I've discovered that on Catalina, pasting a…

84

Scaling React Server Side Rendering

I had the opportunity to work on scaling a React rendering service, adapting a fixed hardware provision to deal with increasing load. Over the course of many months, incremental improvements were made to the system to enable it to cope with demand. I thought it might be useful to share the more interesting insights…

86

Building Fast Interpreters in Rust

In the previous post we described the Firewall Rules architecture and how the different components are integrated together. We created a configurable Rust library for writing and executing Wireshark®-like filters in different parts of our stack written in Go, Lua, C, C++ and JavaScript Workers.

89

Text Rendering Hates You

Rendering text, how hard could it be? As it turns out, incredibly hard! To my knowledge, literally no system renders text “perfectly”. It’s all best-effort, although some efforts are more important than others.