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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,517 posts.

2021
122

Go is not an easy language

Go is not an easy programming language. It is simple in many ways: the syntax is simple, most of the semantics are simple. But a language is more than just syntax; it’s about doing useful stuff . And doing useful stuff is not always easy in Go.

126

Leaky Abstractions

In the late 1990s, the Windows Shell and Internet Explorer teams introduced a bunch of brilliant and intricate designs that allowed extension of the shell and the browser to handle scenarios beyond…

127

60x speed-up of Linux “perf”

The tool is great, but it uses perf to record and analyze profile data, and perf on Debian has a performance problem : when not linked against libbfd , it shells out to addr2line for every address it needs to look up. Thousands and thousands and thousands of incredibly short-lived processes.

136

Wuffs’ PNG image decoder

Summary: Wuffs’ PNG image decoder is memory-safe but can also clock between 1.22x and 2.75x faster than libpng , the widely used open source C implementation. It’s also faster than the libspng , lodepng and stb_image C libraries as well as the most popular Go and Rust PNG libraries. High performance is achieved by…

137

TDD from the Factorio Team

Hello, long time no see :) We obviously have a lot to talk about when it comes to the game changes we recently did, or plan to do, but we don't want to share any of it yet. Yet, there is currently a topic very relevant to us and we can share it without revealing any specific changes to the game. Today's post will be…

143

How the .NET Foundation kerfuffle became a brouhaha

After I wrote most of this blog post the night of October, 5th 2021 I wasn't sure I would post it. After the events of the last 36 hours, I felt I needed to capture my experience on my website where it can only be edited by me. After reading this, I hope you will have a clear set of datapoints from my point of view…

144

The fish shell is amazing

I’ve been lurking the fish shell for a couple of years now (and the nushell but it is another story for another time). Not so long ago, I decided to try it, and it’s simply… amazing. If I had to state one feature that makes me like to use it, it’ll be the autocompletion, hands down. It’s the first time I just take a…

146

Gentle introduction to GPUs inner workings

This article summarizes some lower level aspect of how GPU executes. Although GPU programming is not that complicated when compared to CPU, it also doesn’t match to what hardware is doing exactly. The reason is that we can’t just program GPU without some API, which is an abstraction over its inner workings. Since few…

150

Let's code a TCP/IP stack (2016)

Writing your own TCP/IP stack may seem like a daunting task. Indeed, TCP has accumulated many specifications over its lifetime of more than thirty years. The core specification, however, is seemingly compact[^tcp-roadmap] - the important parts being TCP header parsing, the state machine, congestion control and…