Best of 2025

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

Programming Languages
16

Apple is open sourcing Swift Build

Swift continues to grow in popularity as a cross-platform language supporting a wide variety of use cases, with support on a variety of embedded devices, form factors that encompass wearables to server, and a wide variety of operating systems. As Swift expands, there’s value in investing in matching cross-platform…

20

Why is Zig so cool?

I can’t think of any other language in my 45 years long career that surprised more than Zig . I can easily say that Zig is not only a new programming language, but it’s a totally new way to write programs, in my opinion. To say it’s merely a language to replace C or C++, it’s a huge understatement.

22

Zig's comptime is bonkers good

Programming has obvious abilities to increase productivity through automated manipulation of data. Metaprogramming allows code to be treated as data, turning programming’s power back onto itself. Programming close to the metal has perhaps the most to gain from metaprogramming as high level concepts need to be mapped…

27

Why F#?

If someone had told me a few months ago I’d be playing with .NET again after a 15+ years hiatus I probably would have laughed at this.1 Early on in my career I played with .NET and Java, and even though .NET had done some things better than Java (as it had the opportunity to learn from some early Java mistakes), I…