I have a couple of ideas about learning programming languages. The first is that we do it wrong. I’m sure you’ve experienced this. You try learning a new language and can’t quite see how it all works. Why do I use this syntax here and some other syntax over here? We get frustrated by all the weird bits and go back to…
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been devoting my free time to fleshing out the theory behind non-lexical lifetimes (NLL). I think I’ve arrived at a pretty good point and I plan to write various posts talking about it. Before getting into the details, though, I wanted to start out with a post that lays out roughly how…
I was inexplicably amazed by Lisp since the first day I've seen how Lisp programs look.
As part of my OCaml Labs research project, I implemented a new macro system for OCaml, based on a design by Leo White and Jeremy Yallop [1] .
There are some subtle differences between the revisions of the C standard that makes it possible to create programs that behaves differentl...
One of the most annoying problems in Swift is when the compiler gives an 'Expression was too complex to be solved in a reasonable time' error. I look at why this error occurs, how to avoid it and talk about how this should be solved in a future compiler update.
Few weeks ago a bug was filed against Dart SDK citing "very low performance of String.substring " . Here is a core of microbenchmark developer submitted together with the issue:
There are still some rough edges here, and also a fair amount of content to be added. But if we waited until everything was polished before publishing, it would probably never happen. So feel free to make comments, suggestions, or contribute new content. As always, pull requests are the most desirable.
You find the latest version of my book at the usual place at This now contains all the material that I plan to put into it. New are “experience” parts about performance, function-like m…
C++ has changed a lot in recent years. The last two revisions, C++11 and C++14, introduce so many new features that, in the words of Bjarne Stroustrup, “It feels like a new …
Dmitri's blog about programming, Clojure, and software development
I love LuaJIT for its performance, but its complexity sometimes puts me off.
So the C programming language has been getting a lot of bad press recently; a really stupid bug in some C code has compromised some of the core security infrastructure on the internet. The fix is easy, but the knock-on effects are going to go on for years and will cost serious amounts of money. As a result, people…
This is the first article in a series dedicated to multiple dispatch - an advanced abstraction technique available to programmers out-of-the-box in some languages, and implementable in others. This first post in the series presents the technique and explains the problem it intends to solve. It uses C++ as the…
Interested in learning about APL? Have you heard of this exciting language with strange characters and incredible brevity? Look no further, here you will find an introduction to the language, and even understanding from a historical perspective.
Obviously, not everyone hates Go. But there was a [quora question]( https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Go-seem-to-be-the-most-heavily- criticised-among-the-newer-programming-languages?srid=uCiY&share=1) recently about why everyone criticizes Go so much. (sorry, I don’t normally post links to Quora, but it was the…
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
Working with pure functions is simple: you pass arguments, you get a result — no side effects happen. If, on the other hand, a function does have side effects, like mutating its arguments or global objects, it's harder to reason about. But we've got used to those too: if you see something like player.set_speed(5) you…
