Best of 2020

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2020. 5,567 posts.

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3276

Lambda Calculus Diagrams (2015)

The following table shows diagrams of identity, the booleans, some standard combinators, some Church numerals, the predecessor function on Church numerals, and Omega. term definition diagram alternative I/1 λx.x K/true λx.λy.x false/0 λx.λy.y S λx.λy.λz.(x z)(y z) Y λf.(λx.x x)(λx.f(x x)) 2 λf.λx.f(f x) 3 λf.λx.f(f(f…

3277

Jepsen: Scylla 4.2-rc3

Scylla is a distributed wide-column 1 database which originated as a C++ port of Cassandra, aiming for improved performance. It supports both Cassandra- and DynamoDB -compatible APIs, and is intended for high-throughput, low-latency workloads, including analytics, messaging, and other time-series data.

3280

A New Back End for Cranelift

This post will describe my recent work on Cranelift as part of my day job at Mozilla. In this post, I will set some context and describe the instruction selection problem. In particular, I’ll talk about a revamp to the instruction selector and backend framework in general that we’ve been working on.