Best of 2025

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2025. 375 posts.

Programming Languages
36

Perl's decline was cultural

There's been a flurry of discussion on Hacker News and other tech forums about what killed Perl. I wrote a lot of Perl in the mid 90s and subsequently worked on some of the most trafficked sites on the web in mod_perl in the early 2000s, so I have some thoughts. My take: it was mostly baked into the culture. Perl grew…

47

Why I Chose Common Lisp

After ~7 years, I was done with Clojure . I was writing a some CLI apps , and I hated how long they took to start up. The community at large seemed not to care about this problem, except for the babashka folks. However, I spent long, hard hours banging my head against native-image and it just wasn't working out. It…

48

Tilde, My LLVM Alternative

I'm Yasser and I've made it my mission to produce an alternative to LLVM, the current king of compiler backend libraries. I'm calling it Tilde (or TB for tilde backend) and the reasons are pretty simple, i believe it's far too slow at compiling and far too big to be fixed from the inside. It's been 20 years and cruft…

51

Racket v9.0

_posted by Stephen De Gabrielle and John Clements_ We are pleased to announce Racket v9.0 is now available from https://download.racket-lang.org/. **Racket 9.0 is here!** A major release is always exciting and Racket 9.0 is no exception in that it intr...

54

I Wrote a WebAssembly VM in C

For the last 6 months, I’ve been spending my (limited) free time on evenings and weekends writing a WebAssembly VM in C. After repeatedly throwing away small side-projects, this was an extremely productive experience for me as an engineer. I’m writing this in order to put together some take-aways and organize my…