Best of 2024

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2024. 1,535 posts.

Software Engineering
1181

GCC Specs: An Introduction

If you've ever used the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) then you've worked with the gcc binary. For those who don't know, gcc is a driver, not a compiler. It runs the compiler/assembler/linker as required and coordinates the input and output between them. Use of the driver is so ubiquitous that everyone calls it the…

1189

Speech Dictation Mode for Emacs

T here is a wide range of input mechanisms for computers, starting with keyboards (which are relatively mature) and extending to various types of neural interfaces (currently under research). Speech lies somewhere on this spectrum with a lot of promises but still not much to show for. Keeping accessibility aspects…

1191

Unix version control lore: what, ident

There are a couple of version control commands that deserve wider appreciation: SCCS what and RCS ident . They allow you to find out what source a binary was built from, without having to run it – handy if it is a library! They basically scan a file looking for magic strings that contain version control metadata and…

1199

Packaging Swift Apps for Alpine Linux

While trying to build my Age Apple Secure Enclave plugin , a small Swift CLI app, on Alpine Linux , I realized that the Swift toolchain doesn’t run on Alpine Linux. The upcoming Swift 6 will support (cross-)compilation to a static (musl-based) Linux target, but I suspect an Alpine Linux version of Swift itself isn’t…