Best of 2021

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2021. 399 posts.

Programming Languages
163

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…

165

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…

170

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…

177

Crystal 1.2.0

We are delivering a new release with several bugfixes and improvements. Below we list the most important or interesting changes, without mentioning the several bugfixes. For details visit the release’s notes. Breaking changes are marked with ⚠️.