Best of 2023

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2023. 1,733 posts.

Software Engineering
1100

The Maddest My Code Made Anyone

I was lucky enough to grow up through the early 2000’s, during the golden age of Half-Life mods. Industry classics like Counter-Strike (CS) had just been invented, every month brought new mods to try, and files were too big to download on a dial-up connection so you’d leech them off a server at a big local LAN party…

1105

Emitting Safer Rust with C2Rust

In this post, we will discuss recent results from Immunant and Galois in extending C2Rust to emit memory-safe Rust in certain cases. With this work we aim to shift a meaningful part of the translation burden from the human to the machine. Up until now, C2Rust has only been able to translate C to unsafe Rust that is no…

1108

C++ Papercuts

UPDATE: Wow, this post has gotten popular! I’ve written a new post that adds new papercuts combined with concrete suggestions for how C++ could improve, if you are interested. Also, if you want to read more about C++’s deeper-than-papercut issues, I recommend specifically my post on its move semantics. Thank you for…