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The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 21,843 posts.
UPDATE MARCH 2025: This post, and the template attached, were written for Typst v 0.11 – Typst has upgraded twice since then, and this template will not work with the newer versions of Typst. Please see the new post (Mar 26, 2025) at A New Typst Template for Pandoc
Back in the early 90s, one company was on the bleeding edge of PC gaming: Origin Systems . Their motto was "We Create Worlds" and boy did they deliver: With the Ultima series, Crusader series and Wing Commander series, they consistently took gamer's breath away. One of them took four years and more than a million man…
In addition to parsing and generating machine code for your source files when valid, a compiler frontend's job is also to detect invalid code and give you a hint that explains what is wrong so you can fix the problem.
Recently I’ve been experimenting with freestanding C programs on Windows. Freestanding refers to programs that don’t link, either statically or dynamically, against a standard library (i.e. libc). This is typical for operating systems and similar, bare metal situations . Normally a C compiler can make assumptions…
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Many years ago, Kragen complained about the implementation and performance of Java regexes , and suggested that an implementation that emitted JVM bytecode could perform better. It's been a minute, but I'm happy to report that complaining on the Internet has served its purpose.
I really like the c2 wiki as a historical artifact: a lot of big names in Agile and Extreme Programming argued with each other there.1 One thing they did was the Extreme Programming Challenge, where people tried to test the limits of these approaches. They’d find edge problems (designing databases, remote teams, etc)…
A Python Extension is generally some code written in language other than python to extend the python ecosystem by exposing an interface compatible with Python API.Such extensions are generally in form of compiled code and loaded dynamically by the Python runtime ...
As part of a demonstration in an upcoming article , I wrote a simple trie implementation. A trie is a search tree where the keys are a sequence of symbols (i.e. strings). Strings with a common prefix share an initial path down the trie, and the keys themselves are stored implicitly by the structure of the trie. It’s…
Using JavaScript to write fast, interactive web applications has exploded in popularity over the past few years. JavaScript apps offer many strengths over traditional server-rendered applications. Most notably, rich interactions and lightning-...
As my cat woke me up way too early for a Saturday morning, I decided to put all this extra time (and my ChatGPT Pro subscription) into good use and generated a QR-code generator for PostgreSQL, written as a single pure SQL statement. No external libraries or Postgres extension installation needed! The pqr.sql example…
Sometimes, it's easy to forget how much work there is left to do on a refined emulator. While the rush of getting a new game to boot or discovering a crazy feature hidden within an obscure gem never gets old, those moments do tend to get further and further apart as accuracy increases. As if to defy fate itself…
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I'm happy to announce the general availability of watgo - the W eb A ssembly T oolkit for G o. This project is similar to wabt (C++) or wasm-tools (Rust), but in pure, zero-dependency Go.
The web.py slogan is: “Think about the ideal way to write a web app. Write the code to make it happen.”
For about five years I've been trying to implement a fully conforming C preprocessor for the front end of the CScout refactoring browser. I've found this to be a fiendishly difficult task. Although what I have written can correctly process million-line real-life projects, every once in a while I come across a…
By Robert Smith mine is a brand new IDE for Coalton and Common Lisp, built from the ground up with one purpose: To make Coalton and Common Lisp easier and more accessible to the programming world. TL;DR? Go to mine's homepage with downloads for Windows/macOS/Linux. mine is a complete, single-download application that…
Great to create and know the algorithm of QR code... very information! Thanx Bala
Whilst writing a previous blog post I stumbled across the .NET Interpreter, tucked away in the source code. Although, it I’d made even the smallest amount of effort to look for it, I’d have easily found it via the GitHub ‘magic’ file search:
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
At AdaCore, we’re in the business of supporting people who develop high-integrity software, in particular for embedded systems. In terms of programming…
Note: On the back of some feedback I’ve created a follow-up of this post where I refine the thesis. I’ve left this post as-is for the sake of comparison
For the past months I’ve been keeping a list of things I encountered in PHP that I’ve found to be problematic, or in other words things that annoy me.
Many programmers are aware that C++ templates are Turing-complete, andthis was proved in the 2003 paper C++ Templates areTuring Complete.
