Best of 2023

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2023. 264 posts.

Programming Languages
65

The Registers of Rust

It’s been nearly two and half years since I was an active contributor to the Rust project. There are some releases that I’ve been very excited about since then, and I’m heartened by Niko’s recent blog post emphasizing stability and polish over grand new projects. But I’ve also felt a certain apprehension at a lot of…

74

Zig and Rust

This post will be a bit all over the place. Several months ago, I wrote Hard Mode Rust, exploring an allocation-conscious style of programming. In the ensuing discussion, @jamii name-dropped TigerBeetle, a reliable, distributed, fast, and small database written in Zig in a similar style, and, well, I now find myself…

76

Let's write a setjmp

Yesterday I wrote that setjmp is handy and that it would be nice to have without linking the C standard library. It’s conceptually simple, after all. Today let’s explore some differently-portable implementation possibilities with distinct trade-offs. At the very least it should illuminate why setjmp sometimes requires…

88

A four year plan for async Rust

Four years ago today, the Rust async/await feature was released in version 1.39.0. The announcement post says that “this work has been a long time in development – the key ideas for zero-cost futures, for example, were first proposed by Aaron Turon and Alex Crichton in 2016”. It’s now been longer since the release of…