Best of 2026

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2026. 149 posts.

Programming Languages
39

An incoherent Rust

Coherence and the orphan rules are a frequent source of complaints about Rust, and a common topic of language proposals. This post covers most of the existing proposals around coherence and my vision for how we should solve coherence once and for all.

40

An agent in 100 lines of Lisp

Around 2000 I took an AI course at the University of Guelph. I don’t think I learned too much. We didn’t talk about neural networks, as far as I can remember. My end of term project was, I think, a pathfinding algorithm wearing an AI costume. There were certainly no discussions of transformers. No CUDA. No PyTorch…

48

A perfectable programming language

At a party, Sydney Von Arx asked if I could name 40 programming languages. Yeah, that's the Bay for you. Racket, Agda, Clean, Elm, TypeScript, sh, ASP, Verilog, JavaScript, Scheme, Rust, Nim, INTERCAL, sed, Isabelle, Visual Basic, zsh, AlokScript, Coq, Idris, Hack, Prolog, Whitespace, PureScript, Go, Odin, Haskell…

53

TruffleRuby

TruffleRuby started as my internship project at Oracle Labs in early 2013. It is an implementation of the Ruby programming language on the JVM, using the Graal dynamic compiler and the Truffle AST interpreter framework . TruffleRuby can achieve peak performance well beyond that possible in JRuby at the same time as…

58

Four Months of Zig

It has been about four months since I returned to Zig after being absent for a few years. In this time, I have written some software in Zig and reengaged with the community, online and in person. I decided to share some of that experience, including what I have liked about Zig so far and what I haven't. I'll include…

60

WASM is not quite a stack machine

Everyone knows Wasm is a stack machine. Wikipedia says so, the official Wasm design specification says so, you get it. I thought so too. That is, until I started writing Wasm code – not compiling for Wasm, but writing the instructions by hand. And I found out that there exists a major difference between Wasm and all…