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Software Engineering

The most popular blog posts about software engineering on Hacker News. 1,551 posts.

2022
212

Zulip 5.0: Threaded open-source team chat

We’re excited to announce the release of Zulip Server 5.0, containing hundreds of new features and bug fixes! Zulip is an open-source team collaboration tool with unique topic-based threading that is ideal for both live and asynchronous conversations. Fortune 500 companies, leading open-source projects, …

214

Dear sir, you have built a compiler

I am afraid to inform you that you have built a compiler. I know you wanted a “simple prototype” that would just add that one feature to your programming model. You said that “SSA is an overkill” and “it’s just way too much infrastructure to maintain for a simple task” and yet, six months later, you have pile of…

216

Automatic supercuts on the command line with Videogrep

I’ve been working on some long-needed updates to Videogrep , my command-line tool that automatically generates supercuts. These updates were motivated in part by a 10 week class I recently developed and taught at the School for Poetic Computation called Scrapism (web-scraping-as-art). The class includes a section on…

220

Learn TLA+

tl;dr: online TLA+ manual/advanced techniques/examples here. TLA+ is a tool for testing abstract software designs. I first stumbled on it in 2016 and found it so useful I wrote a free online guide to help others learn it. Then I decided the guide wasn’t good enough and wrote Practical TLA+ in 2018. Then I decided the…

225

Advice for the next dozen Rust GUIs

A few times a week, someone asks on the #gui-and-ui channel on the Rust Discord, “what is the best UI toolkit for my application?” Unfortunately there is still no clear answer to this question. Generally the top contenders are egui, Iced, and Druid, with Slint looking promising as well, but web-based approaches such…

227

How Uber Uses Zig

I talked at the first Zig meetup in Milan about Uber's early experience with Zig: a little about how Uber uses Zig and more about my experience of bringing Zig to Uber, from both technical and social aspects.

229

We're moving on from Firebase

We’ve launched dozens of applications on Firebase, utilized nearly every facet of the platform, and designed a playbook for scaling gracefully. Suffice it to say, it’s proven an invaluable tool for K-Optional Software. As recently as March 2022, our developers were cheering innovations like Firebase Extensions…

230

CRDT: Fractional Indexing

Collaborative peer-to-peer applications sometimes need to operate on sequences of objects with a consistent order across all peers. For example, a peer-to-peer photo album application might need to sync the order in which photos appear in an album.

231

The Hare programming language

Hare is a systems programming language designed to be simple, stable, and robust. Hare uses a static type system, manual memory management, and a minimal runtime. It is well-suited to writing operating systems, system tools, compilers, networking software, and other low-level, high performance tasks.