Friday, May 30, 2008 at 10:43 PM

Moving Past BlueCloth

Fast Markdown libraries for Ruby: two for the price of one.

tratt.net / Wednesday, November 12, 2008 at 03:37 PM

How can C Programs be so Reliable?

Laurence Tratt: “I had implicitly bought into the idea that C programs segfault at random, eat data, and generally act like Vikings on a day trip to Lindisfarne; in contrast, programs written in "higher level” languages supposedly fail in nice, predictable patterns. Gradually it occurred to me that virtually all of the software that I use on a daily a basis – that to which I entrust my most important data – is written in C. And I can’t remember the last time there was a major problem with any of this software – it’s reliable in the sense that it doesn’t crash, and also reliable in the sense that it handles minor failures gracefully."

yosefk.com / Tuesday, June 03, 2008 at 01:17 PM

OO C is passable

Yossi Kreinin: “But I miss virtual functions. I really do. I sincerely think that each and every notable feature C++ adds to C makes the language worse, with the single exception of virtual functions.”

blog.extracheese.org / Friday, May 30, 2008 at 05:00 PM

Processes spawn faster than threads?

Sometimes! Or, fork(2) is a very fast operation on legitimate operating systems. I didn’t realize it could be as fast as spawning a thread, though.

github.com / Tuesday, May 20, 2008 at 04:10 AM

peg-markdown

An implementation of Markdown in portable ANSI C that’s roughly 28.5x faster than the canonical Perl implementation on a 179K test file. Looks like a complete implementation; includes smarty and footnote extensions.

canonical.org / Tuesday, May 20, 2008 at 01:36 AM

Counting Characters in UTF-8 Strings Is Fast

Aristotle Pagaltzis: “Not exactly as fast [as SBCS strlen], but if you write it in asm, it only takes one extra instruction to count characters in UTF-8 vs those in an 8-bit encoding, per character.”

mercury.cs.mu.oz.au / Sunday, February 03, 2008 at 08:15 PM

Mercury is a new, purely declarative logic programming language.

What PrinceXML is coded in, apparently. It’s like Prolog for large systems: declarative, strongly typed and type inferencing, module system, closures, currying, lambdas, and with a strong determinism system. Compiles down to C (as a portable assembler).

groups.google.com / Friday, February 01, 2008 at 12:59 PM

How I lost my faith (in lisp) - comp.lang.lisp

“Between 1988 and 1991 I worked on the research program that led to the Mars Pathfinder rover […] All three of [the prototypes] were programmed not in Lisp, but in little mini-languages whose compilers were written in Lisp.”

ds9a.nl / Thursday, January 03, 2008 at 03:13 AM

DNA seen through the eyes of a coder

“Like with unix, cells are not ‘spawned’ – they are forked. All cells started out from your ovum which has forked itself many times since. Both halves of the fork() are identical to begin with, but they may from then on decide to do different things.”

bash.org / Monday, December 31, 2007 at 09:23 AM

depressing

“maybe try coding something in c”

headius.blogspot.com / Monday, September 03, 2007 at 01:23 PM

Java Native Access + JRuby = True POSIX [headius.blogspot.com]

Java becomes 100% more viable. So simple — why didn’t someone do this in the very beginning?

ruby-doc.org / Thursday, April 05, 2007 at 09:49 PM

Ruby: intern.h Source File

jackpot.

blog.evanweaver.com / Thursday, March 15, 2007 at 10:49 AM

README.EXT

“This document explains how to make extension libraries for Ruby.”

blog.evanweaver.com / Thursday, March 15, 2007 at 10:41 AM

getting dirty with rubyinline [evanweaver.com]

dadhacker.com / Friday, February 02, 2007 at 03:32 PM

Why do we still use C? [dadhacker.com]

“Maybe if we took away these PL theorists’ Emacs and LaTeX packages for a while we’d get better results.”

cabochon.com / Monday, March 13, 2006 at 07:49 PM

Tour de Babel

the best shit ever

shlomifish.org / Tuesday, October 11, 2005 at 11:53 AM

When C is the Best (Tool for the Job)

Perfect timing as I'm just about to write a little piece on how C is the only reason dynamic languages are viable…

lambda-the-ultimate.org / Tuesday, September 27, 2005 at 03:40 PM

expressivity of "idiomatic C"

Best Lambda Thread. Ever.