Best of 2015

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2015. 325 posts.

Programming Languages
273

Strange C Syntax

In my attempts to learn the C programming language well enough to write my own C compiler , I've encountered some very interesting examples of C syntax that you generally don't see every day. All of these examples you'll see here will compile without warnings or errors even with very strict compiler flags in gcc and…

276

Tuning Ruby's Global Method Cache

I was recently profiling a production Shopify application server using perf and noticed a fair amount of time being spent in a particular function, st_lookup, which is used by Ruby’s MRI implementation for hash table lookups: Hash tables are used all over MRI, and not just for the Hash object; global variables…

282

Why We Use Go

Go is decidedly polarizing. While many are touting their transition to Go, it has become equally fashionable to criticize and mock the language. As Bjarne Stroustrup so eloquently put it, “There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses.” This adage couldn’t be…

290

Python is the new BASIC

The above is the Hello World program for Java, arguably one of the most popular programming languages. Encapsulated in the above three lines are several different concepts ranging from static functions to return types to stdout and to the entirety of object oriented programming in general.