Best of 2014

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2014. 313 posts.

Programming Languages
211

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…

212

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…

235

Why Ada isn't Popular (1998)

Rick Thorne writes: > In truth, I like Ada too. I'm a former Ada man myself, as I believe I > mentioned. There are great things about the language, and since we're all > aware of them there's no point in going into them. I also prefer Beta to > VHS. Mathew Heaney responds: This is actually a specious comparison…