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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,834 posts.
Update: Cross-platform C/C++ IDE goes public as CLion!We know many of you are waiting for a cross-platform C++ IDE we announced some time ago, as we've received quite a few applications for a priv
I was recently reminded of why I think it’s a bad idea to teach beginners C++. It’s a bad idea because it is an objective mess—albeit a beautiful, twisted, tragic, wondrous mess. Despite the current state of the community, this post is not a polemic against modern C++. This post is partly a follow-up on Simon Brand’s…
The abstract for article “ The End of Code Review: Coding Agents Supersede Human Inspection ” paints this picture for the reader…
A common issue when writing tests for real-world software is how to deal with third-party dependencies. Let’s examine an old, but counter-intuitive principle.
I was talking with someone today that really really wanted the sqrtps to be used in some code they were writing. And because of a quirk with clang (still there as of clang 18.1.0), if you happened to use -ffast-math clang would butcher the use of the intrinsic. So for the code: __m128 test(const __m128 vec) { return…
A look at how we identify and address bugs
I think by now everybody reading this will have seen how the new generation of Large Language Models like ChatGPT are able to produce somewhat useful code. Like any advance in software development—from IDEs to high-level languages—this has generated some discussion on the future employment prospects in our field.
Leif Singer, an engineer at Automattic, tells us about interviewing for a remote job at Automattic.
Productivity on every platform - a deep dive on the ways we're writing Swift code on Windows, and improving the developer experience along the way.
How much overhead should we expect from enabling integer overflow checks? Using a compiler flag or built-in intrinsics, we should be able to do the check with a conditional branch that branches based on the overflow flag that add and sub set. Code that looks like
Serverless architecture is a cloud-based development model in which the cloud provider manages the servers and the developer only needs to focus on the code.
Welcome to my blog, which was once a mailing list of the same name and is still generated by mail. Please reply via the "comment" links.
Posted by Lars Bergstrom – Director, Android Platform Tools & Libraries and Chair of the Rust Foundation Board Back in 2021, we announced...
Rust is built around the concept of “zero cost abstraction”. The idea is that you can write human-friendly high level code and the compiler will give you for free performance at least as good as any optimized low level code you could have written yourself. With zero cost abstraction, you no longer have to trade off…
(Recap: I founded the curl project, I am still the lead developer and maintainer) When asking curl to get a URL it'll send the output to stdout by default. You can of course easily change this behavior with options or just using your shell's redirect feature, but without any option it'll spew it out to … Continue…
Whether I’m teaching new Pythonistas or long-time Python programmers, I frequently find that Python programmers underutilize multiple assignment....
Earlier this week a letter from an activist imprisoned in France was posted to the internet. Contained within Ivan Alococo’s dispatch from the Villepinte prison
Speculations and specifications. If you were a Winamp user back in the day, or curate an MP3 collection currently, you might recognize the humble ID3 tag. It is what the metadata in the MP3 file is made up of. First it was pretty limited in the version later dubbed ID3v1. Like any good 2.0 they added a ton more…
Starting a long-form history of Visual Basic on EvilGeniusLabs.ca. Chapter 1 covers the BASIC dynasty Microsoft had been running since 1975, the California developer Microsoft bought to put a face on it, and the launch pitch Bill Gates seeded in BYTE Magazine eighteen months before VB shipped. Six articles, focused on…
M'colleague Charles has introduced me to the most spectacular phrase - "Time To 200". That's a measurement of the length of time it takes a new user to go from signing up to your API to getting their first HTTP 200 response. Think about the last time you started using a new API... Fill in a tediously long registration…
There was a recent discussion on the Extreme Programming mailing list kicked off by Ron Jeffries saying he wants his XP back. The implication being that Extreme Programming is no longer practised, and that most “Agile” organisations are actually practising Flaccid Scrum – some agile process but little of the technical…
There are few articles on the design of command-line interfaces (CLIs), even if plenty of articles on designing graphical user interfaces (GUIs) exist. This article is an attempt at presenting some of the most important guidelines for CLI design.
The vulnerabilities we found in Cloudflare's CIRCL FourQ implementation: invalid-point attacks, Edwards-curve edge cases, and the disclosure that fixed them.
TLA+ is a formal specification language that you can use to verify programs. It’s different from other formal verification systems in that it’s very pragmatic. Instead of writing proofs…
Firstly, what exactly is CoreRT? From its GitHub repo .. a .NET Core runtime optimized for AOT (ahead of time compilation) scenarios, with the accompanying .NET native compiler toolchain
