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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,834 posts.
When designing or, in some cases, implementing a programming language with built-in support for Unicode strings, an important decision must be made about how to represent or encode those strings in memory. Not all representations are equal, and there are trade-offs between different choices.
Code says what it does. That’s important for the computer, because code is the way that we ask the computer to do something. It’s OK for humans, as long as we never have to modify or debug the code. As soon as we do, we have a problem. Fundamentally, debugging is an exercise in changing what a program does to match…
Craig Stuntz's personal website about programming languages, type theory, DIY synthesizers, compilers, and math.
For a while now I’ve been telling people that I want Polypane to be prescriptive, not descriptive. In this article I want to expand on that and explain what I mean when I say “prescriptive”. I usually explain it like this: there is no shortage of tooling that will tell you everything you do wrong […]
Memory is a relatively scarce resource on many consumer computers, so a feature to limit how much memory a process uses seems like a good idea, and Microsoft did indeed implement such a feature. Ho…
Understand how closures really work in Rust
Clojure’s history is beautiful and simple in code. Nubank has a lot of reasons to say: happy birthday, Clojure!
Standards are great, until they aren't
The story goes like this. ComputerCraft is a mod that adds programming to Minecraft. You write Lua code that gets executed by a bespoke interpreter with access to world APIs, and now you’re writing code instead of having fun. Computers have limited disk space, and my /nix folder is growing out of control, so I need to…
Read THE WEIRD CONCEPT OF BRANCHLESS PROGRAMMING on sanixdk.xyz
Various thoughts on programming and technology.
The end of semester is here and, as I grade our students semestral works, I get to use CMakeLists of dubious quality. After seeing the same errors repeat over and over again, I decided to write a short tutorial towards writing simple CMakeLists.
Or: The Day My Toaster Started Taking Phone Calls
A subtle G++ bug from 2012, C++20’s new comparison rules, and legacy Boost code can collide to crash Solidity’s compiler on valid code. We unpack the surprising chain reaction and how to fix it.
This blog site has been archived. Go to react.dev/blog to see the recent posts. Although React 17 doesn’t contain new features, it will provide support for a new version of the JSX transform. In this post, we will describe what it is and how to try it. What’s a JSX Transform? Browsers don’t understand JSX out of the…
The Standard does not require that implementations define intptr_t nor uintptr_t. It also does not require that implementations define integer-to-pointer conversions in any meaningful fashion unless they define those types. Conforming implementations are certainly allowed to document some integer-to-pointer…
Recently, I migrated my Clojure-driven pet project from PostgreSQL to Datomic. This is Queryfeed , a web application to fetch data from social networks. I’ve been running it for several years considering it as a playground for some experiments. Long ago, it was written in Python, then I ported it to Clojure.
My thoughts about error handling in APIs after writing a Redis library in Rust.
Event designators have been hiding in not-so-plain-sight since the late 1970s — so powerful that forgetting might be part of a massive conspiracy to wear out developer keyboards faster than otherwise.
But this is slow! With 1,000,000 applications and 1000 users uniformly distributed on both columns, it takes over 100ms. 1
Learn how to run containers on AWS Lambda and leverage the scalability and cost-saving benefits of serverless computing. This article explores the ...
I recently became intrigued by the concept of event sourcing as applied to back-end architecture, specifically a microservice-oriented approach. I have spent the last few years working predominantly on the front-end, and became enamored by the simplicity and elegance of this pattern as the backbone of front-end…
Web Components comprises a set of standards that enable user-defined HTML elements. These elements can go in all the same places as traditional HTML. Despite the long standardization process, the ...
Computers and computer systems are build up from deterministic, comprehensible, building blocks. Their operations and behaviors can be understood and reasoned about. I relate my personal beliefs and mindset on this point, and explore some manifestations and ramifications of this philosophy.
Today, we’re happy to announce RethinkDB 1.12 ( The Wizard of Oz ). Download it now!
