Best of 2014

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2014. 204 posts.

Programming Languages
127

Types Are The Truth

In Chapter 9 of Types and Programming Languages , Pierce presents his exposition of the Simply typed Lambda-Calculus. It is a truly awesome chapter - each subsection in succession constructs a rich and very well detailed system of computation and Pierce is a master of precision, guiding the reader through the maze of…

133

Allocators in Rust

There has been a lot of discussion lately about Rust’s allocator story, and in particular our relationship to jemalloc. I’ve been trying to catch up, and I wanted to try and summarize my understanding and explain for others what is going on. I am trying to be as factually precise in this post as possible. If you see a…

134

Things from Python I'd miss in Go

Let's assume Go has one killer feature – cheap concurrency – not present in any other language with similar serial performance (ruling out say Erlang). And let's agree that it gives Go its perfect niche – and we're only discussing uses of Go outside that niche from now on. So we won't come back to concurrency till the…