Best of 2020

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2020. 169 posts.

Programming Languages
132

Taking PHP Seriously (2016)

Slack uses PHP for most of its server-side application logic, which is an unusual choice these days. Why did we choose to build a new project in this language? Should you? Most programmers who have only casually used PHP know two things about it: that it is a bad language, which they would never use if…

139

Zig 0.6.0 Release Notes

Zig is a general-purpose programming language and toolchain for maintaining robust , optimal , and reusable software. With special thanks to many generous sponsors , the Zig project is financially sustainable and currently supports one full-time developer . Let's reboot systems programming.

140

Why Dark didn't choose Rust

Welcome again HN! Dark [https://darklang.com] is a programming language, structured editor, and infrastructure—all in one—whose goal is to make it 100x easier to build backend services. Check out the website [https://darklang.com/], our What is Dark [https://blog.darklang.com/what-is-dark/] post, and

148

Towards Crystal 1.0

Currently the main goal of the Crystal core team is to reach 1.0 in the near future. Since achieving that goal involves a number of non-obvious tradeoffs, we want to use this post to shed some light on those inherent tensions and how they drive our work and priorities for the next few releases.