Best of 2020

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2020. 533 posts.

Systems & Performance
141

Fast UTF-8 validation

One of the most common "data type" in programming is the text string. When programmers think of a string, they imagine that they are dealing with a list or an array of characters. It is often a "good enough" approximation, but reality is more complex. The characters must be encoded into bits in some way. Most ……