Best of 2019

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2019. 235 posts.

Programming Languages
122

Idiomatic Monads in Rust

A pragmatic new design for high-level abstractions Monads (and, more generally, constructs known as “higher kinded types”) are a tool for high-level abstraction in programming languages1. Historically, there has been a lot of debate inside (and outside) the Rust community about whether monads would be a useful…

133

Initialization in C++ is Seriously Bonkers

I was recently reminded of why I think it’s a bad idea to teach beginners C++. It’s a bad idea because it is an objective mess—albeit a beautiful, twisted, tragic, wondrous mess. Despite the current state of the community, this post is not a polemic against modern C++. This post is partly a follow-up on Simon Brand’s…

135

How an Optimizing Compiler Works

Optimizing compilers are a mainstay of modern software: allowing a programmer to write code in a language that makes sense to them, while transforming it into a form that makes sense for the underlying hardware to run efficiently. The optimizing compiler's job is to figure out what your input program does, and create…