Best of 2023

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2023. 390 posts.

Programming Languages
271

Tree-Structured Concurrency

For a while now I've been trying to find a good way to explain what structured concurrency is, and how it applies to Rust. I've come up with zingers such as: "Structured concurrency is structured programming as applied to concurrent control-flow primitives" . But that requires me to start explaining what structured…

279

Turbo 8 is dropping TypeScript

By all accounts, TypeScript has been a big success for Microsoft. I've seen loads of people sparkle with joy from dousing JavaScript with explicit types that can be checked by a compiler. But I've never been a fan. Not after giving it five minutes, not after giving it five years. So it's with great pleasure that I can…

282

Writing Linux Modules in Ada (2016)

In the following series of blog posts I will document my attempts to write Linux modules using the Ada language. In part 1, I will demonstrate how to write in Ada and build a simple "hello world" Linux kernel module. Additionally, I will introduce a basic customized Ada runtime to support our "hello world" module…

284

Modular Errors in Rust

It is thankfully common wisdom nowadays that documentation must be placed as near as possible to the code it documents, and should be fine-grained to a minimal unit of describability (the thing being documented). The practice provides numerous benefits to the codebase and project as a whole:

288

Was BASIC that horrible or better?

Everything was fine until BASIC entered the picture. Edsger Dijkstra in a hallucination of 2023’s AI Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication. Leonardo Da Vinci It is practically impossible to teach good programming to students that have had a prior exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally…