Best of 2023

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

Programming Languages
96

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…

104

Why Lisp?

A lot of people ask us the question, why do we choose to use Common Lisp as our primary development language? Often times the question comes disguised as a suggestion: "Flask is a great webserver you should consider using". This is a well intentioned suggestion- of course we would like to use the best tools available!…

109

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…

111

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…