Best of 2021

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

Software Engineering
136

Wuffs’ PNG image decoder

Summary: Wuffs’ PNG image decoder is memory-safe but can also clock between 1.22x and 2.75x faster than libpng , the widely used open source C implementation. It’s also faster than the libspng , lodepng and stb_image C libraries as well as the most popular Go and Rust PNG libraries. High performance is achieved by…

137

TDD from the Factorio Team

Hello, long time no see :) We obviously have a lot to talk about when it comes to the game changes we recently did, or plan to do, but we don't want to share any of it yet. Yet, there is currently a topic very relevant to us and we can share it without revealing any specific changes to the game. Today's post will be…

144

The fish shell is amazing

I’ve been lurking the fish shell for a couple of years now (and the nushell but it is another story for another time). Not so long ago, I decided to try it, and it’s simply… amazing. If I had to state one feature that makes me like to use it, it’ll be the autocompletion, hands down. It’s the first time I just take a…