Best of 2017

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2017. 894 posts.

Software Engineering
608

Not Explicit

Oftentimes when I am conversing about the design of Rust with other users - as on RFCs or the internals forum - I witness a peculiar remark about “explicitness.” It usually goes something like this: I do not like Feature Design X because it is too implicit. Magic is okay in Other Language Y, but Rust is supposed to be…

624

Undefined Behavior in 2017

Since you talk about the sanitizers and tools like Checked-C, I’ll note there’s also SaferCPlusPlus[1], which is essentially a memory-safe (and data race safe) subset of C++. The idea is that there are a finite number of C++ elements that contribute to memory unsafety, and since the advent of C++11, it is now…