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Rust's derive often implies inline
In Rust, one of the most common ways to implement core traits (like Debug , Display , and Clone ) is to #[derive(...)] them, e.g.:
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Common Lisp Development Tooling
A beginner's exploration of the many layers of Common Lisp development environments.
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I made a programming language with M&Ms
I built a tiny programming language where programs are candy grids, complete with a renderer, photo decoder, AST tree, and execution trace.
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G# – A modern .NET language with Go, Kotlin, and Swift ergonomics
Meet G#: expressive data types, explicit nullability, and structured concurrency on .NET. Explore real examples and run your first project.
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A case against currying
Curried functions are probably one of the first new things you come across if you go from an imperative language to a functional language. In purely functional languages, the convention is to define an n-parameter function inductively by staggering the parameters: applying the function to argument #1 returns a…
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NoiseLang: Where N = 5 is a Dirac delta
A signals-and-noise course left me writing Monte Carlo math on paper and wishing the notation itself would run. Nine years later, with an AI agent doing the heavy lifting, NoiseLang became a real Monte Carlo language that runs the same fused kernel on the GPU, on every CPU core, and on WebAssembly.
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Go Naming Conventions: A Practical Guide
My new book guides you through the start-to-finish build of a real world web application in Go — covering topics like how to structure your code, manage dependencies, create dynamic database-driven pages, and how to authenticate and authorize users securely .
129
Turbo Pascal on CP/M, MSX-DOS and MS-DOS
The Pascal language was named after Blaise Pascal (see picture), a French mathematician who was a pioneer in computer development history. In 1641, at the age of eighteen, Pascal constructed the first arithmetical machine, arguably the first computer. He would improve upon the instrument eight years later. In 1650…
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Go 1.26 Interactive Tour
New with expressions, type-safe error checking, and faster everything.
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Garbage collection without unsafe code
Many people, including myself, have implemented garbage collection (GC)libraries for Rust. Manish Goregaokar wrote up a fantastic survey of thisspace a few y...
132
Understanding Clojure's Persistent Vectors, pt. 1 (2013)
Ever wondered how Clojure's persistent vector actually works? This is part 1 of a blog series which aims to explain them.
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C++26: The New Debugging Header
If you’ve ever needed to hit a breakpoint programmatically in C++, you’ve probably written something like this: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 #if defined(_MSC_VER) __debugbreak(); #elif defined(__clang__) __builtin_debugtrap(); #elif defined(__GNUC__) && (defined(__i386__) || defined(__x86_64__)) __asm__ volatile("int3"); #else…
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OpenLDK: Bringing the Java World into Common Lisp
Java classes become CLOS classes, seven JVM languages share one Lisp expression, and a saved Spring Boot application launches in 84 milliseconds.
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Teaching Kids Forth
Forth is uncommonly used to teach programming to kids. Scripting languages like Python and visual environments like Scratch are far more popular options. But when I got the opportunity to introduce middle and high school students to programming, I chose the stack-oriented concatenative language from 1970. I was…
136
What canceled my Go context?
How Go 1.20's WithCancelCause and Go 1.21's WithTimeoutCause let you attach a reason to context cancellation, plus a gotcha with manual cancel and the stdlib pattern that covers every path.
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QBE – Compiler Backend – 1.3
QBE 1.3 took a while to cook, but it is the most significant release since 1.0 with around 7k new lines of code and 1.5k deleted ones. In addition to the usual bug fixes, QBE gained a new and original IL matching algorithm, new optimizations from Roland Paterson-Jones, Scott Graham added support for the Windows ABI…
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Exploring PDP-1 Lisp (1960)
Introduction to Lisp programming on a PDP-1, with a hands-on practical focus
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Iterating Backwards in C
This is shorter than some of my other posts, but I keep seeing people doing this wrong. It's even worse now in the LLM era.
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A few good ideas in programming languages
Crystal is a compiled programming langauge with static type-checking with syntax very similar to the Ruby programming language . Something that keeps Crystal feeling like a dynamically typed language is how a variable can be assigned to multiple types throughout the course of its lifetime, unlike most statically typed…
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Gödel, Escher, Elisp: The Beauty of Macros
If you are an Emacs user with a keen eye, you will have noticed that in Emacs Lisp, code is data. After all, 'Lisp' is shorthand for 'List Processing'. One of E...
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Any application that can be written in a system language, eventually will be
Atwood's Law predicted JavaScript's dominance through accessibility. A new corollary is emerging: system languages will win through operational efficiency and AI-assisted development.
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I'm not a fan of Deno's security model (2024)
this has been bothering me for a while now, so I want to write down my thoughts so I can get it out of my head and move on. we’re gonna talk about how Deno approaches security, specifically with its permissions system, and why I think this approach is fundamentally insecure and misleading.
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Contracts in Nix
The Nix language lacks a good type system . There are already several configuration languages that provide static and even gradual typing (see, e.g., Cue , Dhall , or Nickel ), but none offer the ability to easily annotate legacy Nix code with types.
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Redefining Go Functions
I once wrote a Perl subroutine that would memoize the subroutine that called it. That much was useful, but then it inserted a copy of itself into the caller, so that its callers would be memoized too. A well-placed call to aggressively_memoize could back-propagate to the whole codebase, spreading functional purity…
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Using GCC's Nested Functions with Wide Pointers and No Trampolines II
When the address of a nested function is taken, GCC creates at trampoline at run-time. This trampoline is placed on the stack, which means that the stack has to be executable. This is problematic because a non-executable stack is an important security feature. For some time now, GCC has the option to place the…
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The Cost of Indirection in Rust
Why 'indirection has a cost' is usually the wrong reason to inline and what actually costs you.
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Understanding the Go Runtime: The Memory Allocator
In the previous article we explored how the Go runtime bootstraps itself — how a Go binary goes from the operating system handing it control to your func main() running. During that bootstrap, one of the first things the runtime sets up is the memory allocator. And that’s what we’re going to explore today. Think of…
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How do I deal with memory leaks? (2022)
These are questions about C++ Style and Technique that people ask me often. If you have better questions or comments on the answers, feel free to email me (bs at cs dot tamu dot edu). Please remember that I can't spend all of my time improving my homepages.