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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,812 posts.

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1471

Ruby 3.2’s YJIT is Production-Ready

YJIT, a just-in-time (JIT) implementation on top of CRuby built at Shopify, is now production-ready and delivering major improvements to performance and speed. Maxime shares the updates that have been made in this newest version of YJIT, and future plans for further optimization.

1484

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…

1492

Think in Math, Write in Code

Programmers love to discuss programming languages. We not only debate their technical merits and aesthetic qualities, but they become integrated into our personal identities, along with the values and traits that we associate with them. Some even defend a form of Linguistic Determinism that thinking is confined to…

1496

Here is why vim uses the hjkl keys as arrow keys

I was reading about vim the other day and found out why it used `hjkl` keys as arrow keys. When Bill Joy created the vi text editor he used the ADM-3A terminal, which had the arrows on hjkl keys. Naturally he reused the same keys and the rest is history. Here is how the `hjkl` keys looked. ADM-3A keyboard's hjkl…

1499

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.