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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,842 posts.
QuickCheck is the grandfather of property-based testing libraries. Despite being imitated in over thirty languages, the original implementation remains pre-eminent due to the type system and consistent logic of the Haskell language in which it is written.
A delightful language with friendly error messages, great performance, small assets, and no runtime exceptions.
A notorious ‘second-system effect‘ often afflicts the successors of small experimental prototypes. The urge to add everything that was left out the first time around all too frequently leads to huge and overcomplicated design. Less well known, because less common, is the ‘third-system effect’; sometimes, after the…
I am a big fan of C, but some part of me always yearn to have just enough higher level constructs.
You can go far without writing TLA+ syntax now, but you still need to understand temporal logic.
There are many interesting, useful, and fun C libraries in the software ecosystem. While one could go and rewrite these libraries in Swift, usually there is no need, because Swift provides direct interoperability with C. With a little setup, you can directly use existing C libraries from your Swift code.
Functions include in the standard C math library that seem unnecessary at first glance and why they are necessary.
This story started back in 1996. I was in my early twenties, working as a programmer at a small company specializing in on-line reporting of certain pharmaceutical data. There was a web-based application (which was extremely cool considering how long ago this was), but unfortunately it was written in Visual Basic by a…
A draft design document describing lightweight userland cooperative threads for SBCL.
Oftentimes when I am conversing about the design of Rust with other users - as on RFCs or the internals forum - I witness a peculiar remark about “explicitness.” It usually goes something like this: I do not like Feature Design X because it is too implicit. Magic is okay in Other Language Y, but Rust is supposed to be…
How should a fuzzer balance exploration and minimization? Samus has the answer.
Computer Science, Machine Learning, Programming, Art, Mathematics, Philosophy, and Short Fiction
PyPy 2.6.0 - Cameo Charm We’re pleased to announce PyPy 2.6.0, only two months after PyPy 2.5.1. We are particulary happy to update cf...
Concurrent operations can be grouped relatively neatly into categories based on their cost
How do demosceners create complex computer animations in just a few kilobytes? One of our secret weapons is Shader Minifier, a tool that minifies GLSL code. Over the years, it has evolved to pack more data into tiny executables, pushing the boundaries of what's possible. In this blog post, we'll go through its…
Freelance web developer, lover of JS and all new stuff #reactjs, #redux, #docker #machinelearning... Co-founder and CTO @AppBubbleBD, involved in @AllOverSequins, @recursecenter alumni
Recently I was listening to the excellent DotNetRocks podcast and they had Steven Sanderson (of Knockout.js fame) talking about ‘WebAssembly and Blazor’.
posted by Matthew Flatt with thanks to collaborators Kent Dybvig, Andy Keep, Gustavo Massaccesi, Sarah Spall, Sam Tobin-Hochstadt, and Jon Zeppieri It's been almost a year since we decided to try running Racket on Chez Scheme, and it has been almost six ...
I have been curious about data compression and the Zip file format in particular for a long time. At some point I decided to address that by learning how it works and writing my own Zip program. The implementation turned into an exciting programming exercise; there is great pleasure to be had from creating a well…
This is the third in a series of articles on building a toy browser rendering engine. Want to build your own? Start at the beginning to learn more:
Blog of Jonas Bernoulli
If you have ever tried to minimize a function with gradient descent, you probably noticed that some functions are a joy to optimize and others are a nightmare. The difference often boils down to two properties: strong convexity and L-smoothness. These two concepts define a “sandwich” of quadratic bounds around your…
After working through “the book” on the Rust programming language and getting started with the first non-trivial, real-world application I found myself faced with a question I didn’t yet feel well-equipped to handle: “How should you structure error handling in a mature rust application?”
