Best of 2026

The blog posts Hacker News loved most in 2026. 967 posts.

Software Engineering
693

Memory layout in Zig with formulas

I was recently encouraged to watch A Practical Guide to Applying Data Oriented Design (DoD) by Andrew Kelley, the creator of Zig1. Just 10 minutes into the talk, I was confronted with a skill I had never formally learned… the arithmetic behind memory layout of types. Zig is a modern, C-like programming language which…

717

Memory safety absolutists

When seeing the title of this post, I bet in some people's minds, the first thought was "Rust devs!". This connection is not unfounded. Rust devs tend to be passionate about memory safety. Some of it, I'm sure, may have been caused by a classic language wars attitude: my language is better than yours, and here is why…