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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,842 posts.

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16591

What part of Rust compilation is the bottleneck?

Rust compilation times is an ongoing topic that generates many discussions online1. Most people don’t really care about what exactly takes time when compiling Rust program; they just want it to be faster in general. But sometimes, you can see people pointing fingers at specific culprits, like LLVM or the borrow…

16596

In-Memory Filesystems in Rust

I’ve been working on a CLI tool recently, and one of the things it does is manage files on disk. I have written a lot of file management tests for Bundler, and the two biggest reasons that the Bundler test suite is slow are exec and fstat. Knowing that, I thought I would try to get out ahead of the slow file stat…

16602

Size visualization of Go executables using D3

Note The latest version of this document can be found online at https://dr-knz.net/go-executable-size-visualization-with-d3.html. Alternate formats: Source, PDF. Note Erratum (2019-04-02): The increase in binary size from CockroachDB v1.0 to v19.2 is 94%/125%, not 194%/225% as initially written. The increase in source…

16606

Practical Libc-free threading on Linux

Suppose you’re not using a C runtime on Linux, and instead you’re programming against its system call API. It’s long-term and stable after all. Memory management and buffered I/O are easily solved, but a lot of software benefits from concurrency. It would be nice to also have thread spawning capability. This article…

16609

Edit your code in the cloud with bitbucket

Have you ever wanted to make a quick change to a file in a repository without having to clone it locally? You want to edit your code where it lives. Introducing the Bitbucket online editor: edit your code directly with Bitbucket – no command line, no cloning, no local editor. Edit any file, anywhere From Bitbucket…

16612

A New Development for Coverity and Heartbleed

Byte swapping does not necessarily imply the data comes from an external source. For example, when writing graphics code, you sometimes need to do byte swapping if you’re converting between 24-bit RGB and BGR image formats (Windows’ GDI famously uses BGR so this is one place where you need to do such conversions)…

16620

The plumber programmer

I called someone a plumber programmer the other day. The person I was speaking to didn't realize that "plumber programmer" is a term of great respect. The plumber is often the most experienced programmer on a team. As with literal plumbing, software plumbing connects things together. It deals with things other people…