Best of 2021

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2021. 255 posts.

Programming Languages
93

From Julia to Rust

I've been more serious about learning Rust recently, after dragging on with passive learning for a while. My first real programming language was Julia, and I know other Julians interested in Rust. I've written this article for those people in mind, because Rust and Julia are good performance sparring partners, but…

95

Generics facilitators in Go

Go 1.18 is going to be released with generics support . Adding generics to Go was a multi-year effort and was a difficult one. Go type system is not a traditional type system and it was not possible just to bring an existing generics implementation from other language and be done. The current proposal was accepted…

98

Fitting a FORTH in 512 bytes

Software is full of circular dependencies if you look deep enough. Compilers written in the language they compile are the most obvious example, but not the only one. To compile a kernel, you need a running kernel. Linkers, build systems, shells. Even text editors, if you want to write the code instead of just…

108

Down the Golang Nil Rabbit Hole

Edit 2021-03-30: Jeremy Mikkola wrote about some closely related topics back in 2017. Edit 2021-03-31: Chris Siebenmann wrote a response to this post that explains exactly how interface values that are nil are typed. It’s more complicated than I thought! I’m not sure I have another Rust & Postgres blog post in me…

116

Get a Life

When I was a kid, I wrote a BASIC program to explore Conway’s Game of Life on my 8088. It was painfully slow, so I began an assembly rewrite. But I failed at Life: I abandoned the project in frustration because I kept freezing up my system.