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Software Engineering

The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,274 posts.

2018
123

How I Wrote a Modern C++ Library in Rust

Since version 56, Firefox has had a new character encoding conversion library called encoding_rs. It is written in Rust and replaced the old C++ character encoding conversion library called uconv that dated from early 1999. Initially, all the callers of the character encoding conversion library were C++ code, so the…

129

Announcing Go Support for AWS Lambda

This post courtesy of Paul Maddox, Specialist Solutions Architect (Developer Technologies). Today, we’re excited to announce Go as a supported language for AWS Lambda. As someone who’s done their fair share of Go development (recent projects include AWS SAM Local and GoFormation), this is a release I’ve been looking…

130

Software Complexity Is Killing Us

Since the dawn of time (before software, there was only darkness), there has been one constant: businesses want to build software cheaper and faster. It is certainly an understandable and laudable goal – especially if you’ve spent any time around software developers. It is a goal that every engineer should support…

136

Postgres 11 – A First Look

Postgres 11 is almost here, in fact the latest beta shipped today, and it features a lot of exciting improvements. If you want to get the full list of features it is definitely worth checking out the release notes, but for those who don’t read the release notes I put together a run down of some what I consider the…

137

Pick strong consistency whenever possible

Do you like complex application logic? We don’t either. One of the things we’ve learned here at Google is that application code is simpler and development schedules are shorter when developers can rely on underlying data stores to handle complex transaction processing and keeping data ordered. To quote the original…

139

Functional core, imperative shell (2012)

Purely functional code makes some things easier to understand: because values don't change, you can call functions and know that only their return value matters—they don't change anything outside themselves. But this makes many real-world applications difficult: how do you write to a database, or to the screen? In…

141

Async and Await in Rust: a full proposal

I’m really excited to announce the culmination of much of our work over the last four months: a pair of RFCs for supporting async & await notation in Rust. This will be very impactful for Rust in the network services space. The change is proposed as two RFCs: RFC #2394: which adds async & await notation to the…

149

Bing.com now runs on .NET Core

Bing.com is a cloud service that runs on thousands of servers spanning many datacenters across the globe. Bing servers handle thousands of users’ queries every second from consumers around the world doing searches through their browsers, from our partners using the Microsoft Cognitive Services APIs, and from the…