Best of 2021

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2021. 1,517 posts.

Software Engineering
70

Speed of Rust vs. C

The run-time speed and memory usage of programs written in Rust should about the same as of programs written in C, but overall programming style of these languages is different enough that it's hard to generalize their speed. This is a summary of where they're the same, where C is faster, and where Rust is faster.

72

Zulip 4.0: Threaded open source team chat

We’re excited to announce the release of Zulip Server 4.0, containing hundreds of new features and bug fixes! Zulip is an open-source team collaboration tool with unique topic-based threading that combines the best of email and chat to make remote work productive and delightful. Fortune 500 companies, …

79

Programming is hard

Most beginners in programming eventually end up with the same ingratiating message: „Programming is easy, everyone can do it”, with some threatening message that people doing the gatekeeping should stop doing that. I’m here to tell you that that is not true. Programming is hard, programming is not for everyone, and…

88

Surprisingly Slow

I have an affinity for performance optimization and making software as efficient as possible. Over the years, I've encountered specific instances and common patterns that make software or computers slow. In this post, I'll shine a spotlight on some of them.