Best of 2017

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2017. 526 posts.

Software Engineering
219

On mutex performance and WTF::Lock

One of the things I’ve been doing this quarter is removing Gecko’s dependence on NSPR locks . Gecko’s (non-recursive) mutexes and condition variables now use platform-specific constructs, rather than indirecting through NSPR. This change makes things smaller, especially on POSIX platforms, and uses no dynamic memory…

228

Modernizing the DOM Tree in Microsoft Edge

The DOM is the foundation of the web platform programming model, and its design and performance impacts the rest of the browser pipeline. However, its history and evolution is far from a simple story. Over the past three years, we’ve embarked on an in-flight refactoring of the DOM in Microsoft Edge, with our eye on

232

Racket v6.8

_posted by Vincent St-Amour_ Racket version 6.8 is now available from http://racket-lang.org/ Racket sports a new logo, courtesy of Matthew Butterick. MacBook Pro laptops with touch bars are supported. Support for FreeBSD on PowerPC. ...

240

Search at Slack

On average, 20% of a knowledge worker’s day is spent looking for the information they need to get their work done. If you think about a typical work week, that means an entire day is dedicated to this task! To help our users find more time in their day, the Search, Learning, and Intelligence team set…