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Monorepos and Forced Migrations
Monorepos and Forced Migrations By most metrics, Google is a great place to work. Top tier compensation, free food, and largely co-workers who want do...
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Software Engineering
The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,517 posts.
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James Gosling Interview
We had an opportunity to talk with James Gosling, a Canadian computer scientist, best known as the father of the Java programming language, and get his insight into the languages, features, and solutions that we use every day.
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A rough proposal for sum types in Go (2018)
Sum types are pretty cool. Just like how a struct is basically “This contains one of these and one of these”, a sum type is “This contains one of …
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JVM Anatomy Quark #26: Identity Hash Code
"JVM Anatomy Quarks" is the on-going mini-post series, where every post is describing some elementary piece of knowledge about JVM. The name underlines the fact that the single post cannot be taken in isolation, and most pieces described here are going to readily interact with each other.
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Constexpr is a Platform (2020)
Let me share a useful insight with you: constexpr is a platform. Just like you write code that targets Windows or a microcontroller, you write code that targets compile-time execution. In both cases you restrict yourself to the subset of C++ that works on your target platform, use conditional compilation if your code…
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Building a Desktop Application for Datasette
This week I started experimenting with a desktop application version of Datasette—with the goal of providing people who aren’t comfortable with the command-line the ability to get Datasette up and …
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Rethinking software testing: perspectives from the world of hardware (2019)
The conventional view of Software Testing The hardware and software worlds may seem poles apart, and in many ways, they indeed are. But there’s a wealth of knowledge that each can learn from the ot…
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Inline and Sideline Approaches for Low-Cost Memory Safety in C
This technical report is based on a dissertation submitted November 2020 by the author for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy to the University of Cambridge, Selwyn College.
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Writing Python Extensions in Assembly
A deep-dive technical overview of how you can write CPython extensions in assembly (with a bonus tutorial on assembly programming)
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Supercharge Your Node.js with Rust
Dmitry Kudryavtsev is a software engineer with more than a decade of experience in the industry, and a tech entrepreneur creating sustainable online business.
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Where should the debugger set a breakpoint?
When you search for executions of a function in Pernosco (or set a breakpoint in a more traditional debugger), how does the debugger decide where to stop? You might think it just stops at the first instruction in a function, but that's not true in general. Debuggers actually stop immediately after the function's…
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Dynamic Queries in Ecto (Elixir Lang)
The macro Ecto Query dynamic/2 allows you to build query fragments and interpolate them into one large query. We get easy-to-manage query building in an accessible way. It allows you to control the parameters from the user and transparently create filtering of data stored in the database.
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Deconstructing the Postgres planner to find indexing opportunities
We take a behind the scenes look at the pganalyze Index Advisor and discuss a few recent improvements, such as utilizing selectivity information better.
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Evolution of tree data structures for indexing
I have to admit, my research blog posts are getting longer and longer. From one side I find it genuinely encouraging, because if one gets so much information just by scratching the topic, imagine what’s hidden beneath the surface! One university professor once said “what could be interesting in databases?”, and it…
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Subclassing in Python Redux
The conflict between subclassing and composition is as old as object-oriented programming. The latest crop of languages like Go or Rust prove that you don’t need subclassing to successfully write code. But what’s a pragmatic approach to subclassing in Python, specifically?
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Cranelift, Part 3: Correctness in Register Allocation
This post is the last in a three-part series about Cranelift . In the first post , I covered overall context and the instruction-selection problem; in the second post , I took a deep dive into compiler performance via careful algorithmic design.
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Error stack traces in Go with x/xerror
A workaround to get nice stack traces for errors in Go.
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One Way to Represent Things
How types might be the missed part of the future of code
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Documents ≠ Programs
I've recently become active again on twtxt.net , the platform that puts the "social" in "anti-social social media". There is a lot of intelligent discussion to be had there, and for the past couple days a discussion has been going on about technology buzzwords and, later, unnecessary complexity on websites. I was…
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Rust: Enums to Wrap Multiple Errors
This is a follow-up to Error handling in Rust from a couple of days ago. The moment we want to use error propagation for different error types, we have to rely on trait objects with Box<dyn Error>, which means we defer a lot of information from compile-time to runtime, for the sake of convenient error handling.
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Introduction to WebAssembly Components
WebAssembly and WASI show great promise for the future of computing outside the browser, and the WebAssembly component model aims to improve the portability, cross-language, and composition story for Wasm. This article explains the goals of the component model, and showcases how to use tooling from the Bytecode…
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Lessons on Writing JavaScript and React from ClojureScript
Technical blog of Ryan Jerue
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Allocgate: Restructuring how allocators work in Zig
Version 0.9 of the Zig programming language is planned to release in about a week. One of the major changes coming in this release is a restructuring of how allocators work, which has been termed Allocgate . This is a breaking change to the Allocator API provided by the standard library, so pretty much any code that…
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What's good about offset pagination; designing parallel cursor-based web APIs
Offset pagination gets a bad rap because it’s backend inefficient, but it’s actually a nice feature from a consumer’s perspective. How to bring those advantages to cursor-based APIs.
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; Echo “Shell Injection”
This is an introductory article about shell injection, a security vulnerability allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code on the user's machine. This is a well-studied problem, and there are simple and efficient solutions to it. It's relatively easy to design library API in such a way as to shield the application…
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When can glibc be built with Clang?
Updated in 2026: glibc 2.43 added experimental support for building with Clang. In September 2021, I wrote "So, dear glibc, will you be happy with my sending Clang patches?" in Build glibc with LLD 13. We have come to a turning point. In Linux Plumbers Conference 2021, at the glibc Birds of a Feather session, I asked…