Best of 2020

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2020. 1,508 posts.

Software Engineering
811

Which Parsing Approach?

We all know that parsing is an important part of designing and implementing programming languages, but it’s the equivalent of Brussels sprouts: good for the diet, but a taste that only a select few enjoy. Unfortunately, I’ve come to realise that our general distaste for parsing is problematic. While many of us think…

819

F (2006)

F is a pure functional concatenative language originally designed as an extension of False . F contains the list-operations of K3 and the dip combinator of Joy . Floating-point and symbolic datatypes are supported. One-time assignment is enforced in syntax. A theory of function-valence and -charge is outlined. F also…

833

GTK 3.99

This week, we're releasing GTK 3.99, which can only mean one thing: GTK4 is getting really close! Back in February, when 3.98 was released, we outlined the features that we wanted to land before making a feature-complete 3.99 release. This was the list: Event controllers for keyboard shortcuts Movable popovers…

839

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.