A few months ago, I set myself the challenge of writing a C compiler in 500 lines of Python1, after writing my SDF donut post. How hard could it be? The answer was, pretty hard, even when dropping quite a few features. But it was also pretty interesting, and the result is surprisingly functional and not too hard to understand! There's too much code for me to comprehensively cover in a single blog
Lessons from Writing a Compiler
The prototypical compilers textbook is: 600 pages on parsing theory. Three pages of type-checking a first-order type system like C. Zero pages on storing and checking the correctness of declarations (the “symbol table”). Zero pages on the compilation model, and efficiently implementing separate compilation. 450 pages on optimization and code generation. The standard academic literature is most use
Hello everyone, Asahi Lina here!✨ marcan asked me to write an article about the M1 GPU, so here we are~! It’s been a long road over the past few months and there’s a lot to cover, so I hope you enjoy it! What’s a GPU?You probably know what a GPU is, but do you know how they work under the hood? Let’s take a look! Almost all modern GPUs have the same main components: A bunch of shader cores, which
Programming is an iterative process - as much as we would like to come up with the perfect solution from the start, it rarely works that way. Good programs often start as quick prototypes. The bad ones stay prototypes, but the best ones evolve into production code. Whether you’re writing games, CLI tools, or designing library APIs, prototyping helps tremendously in finding the best approach before
Gamedev in Lisp. Part 1: ECS and Metalinguistic Abstraction - cl-fast-ecs by Andrew
Gamedev in Lisp. Part 1: ECS and Metalinguistic Abstraction In this series of tutorials, we will delve into creating simple 2D games in Common Lisp. The result of the first part will be a development environment setup and a basic simulation displaying a 2D scene with a large number of physical objects. It is assumed that the reader is familiar with some high-level programming language, has a gener
Weird Lexical Syntax
I just learned 42 programming languages this month to build a new syntax highlighter for llamafile. I feel like I'm up to my eyeballs in programming languages right now. Now that it's halloween, I thought I'd share some of the spookiest most surprising syntax I've seen. The languages I decided to support are Ada, Assembly, BASIC, C, C#, C++, COBOL, CSS, D, FORTH, FORTRAN, Go, Haskell, HTML, Java,
Golang Mini Reference 2022: A Quick Guide to the Modern Go Programming Language (REVIEW COPY)
Golang Mini Reference 2022 A Quick Guide to the Modern Go Programming Language (REVIEW COPY) Harry Yoon Version 0.9.0, 2022-08-24 REVIEW COPY This is review copy, not to be shared or distributed to others. Please forward any feedback or comments to the author. • feedback@codingbookspress.com The book is tentatively scheduled to be published on September 14th, 2022. We hope that when the release da
Parsing SQL - Strumenta
The code for this tutorial is on GitHub: parsing-sql SQL is a language to handle data in a relational database. If you worked with data you have probably worked with SQL. In this article we will talk about parsing SQL. It is in the same league of HTML: maybe you never learned it formally but you kind of know how to use it. That is great because if you know SQL, you know how to handle data. However
Masato Hagiwara Open in Recto Pad Google Colab Github Recto Pad TL;DR Recto is a 2D programming language that uses nested rectangles as its core syntax, encoding structure and recursion directly in space instead of a linear stream of text. Recto explores new ways to write, parse, and reason about code—and even natural language—spatially. Introduction Open in Recto Pad Virtually all the languages w
Over the course of my Spring 2020 semester at Harvey Mudd College, I developed a self-hosting compiler entirely from scratch. This article walks through many interesting parts of the project. It’s laid out so you can just read from beginning to end, but if you’re more interested in a particular topic, feel free to jump there. Or, take a look at the project on GitHub. Table of contents What the pro
A Walk with LuaJIT
The following is a chronicle of implementing a general purpose zero-instrumentation BPF based profiler for LuaJIT. Some assumptions are made about what this entails and it may be helpful to read some of our other work in this area. One major change from prior efforts is that instead of working with the original Parca unwinder we are now working with the OpenTelemetry eBPF profiler. If you missed t
Having worked a bit in Zig, Rust, Go and now C, I think there are a few common topics worth having a fresh conversation on: automatic memory management, the standard library, and explicit allocation. Zig is not a mature language. But it has made enough useful choices for a number of companies to invest in it and run it in production. The useful choices make Zig worth talking about. Go and Rust are
TinyCompiler: a compiler in a week-end Introduction Have you ever wondered how a compiler works, but you never found courage to find out? Then this series of articles is for you. I have never had the chance to look under the hood either, but one week-end I have decided to to write a translator from the esoteric programming language wend (short for week-end), which I just invented myself, into regu
Tier 4 Support § Support for these targets is entirely experimental. If this target is provided by LLVM, LLVM may have the target as an experimental target, which means that you need to use Zig-provided binaries for the target to be available, or build LLVM from source with special configure flags. zig targets will display the target if it is available. This target may be considered deprecated by
Accelerate Python code 100x by import taichi as ti | Taichi Docs
Python has become the most popular language in many rapidly evolving sectors, such as deep learning and data sciences. Yet its easy readability comes at the cost of performance. Of course, we all complain about program performance from time to time, and Python should certainly not take all the blame. Still, it's fair to say that Python's nature as an interpreted language does not help, especially
Let’s Write a Tree-Sitter Major Mode Creating a standard programming major mode presents significant challenges, with the intricate tasks of establishing proper indentation and font highlighting being among the two hardest things to get right. It's painstaking work, and it'll quickly descend into a brawl between the font lock engine and your desire for correctness. Tree-sitter makes writing many m
We recently overhauled our internal tools for visualizing the compilation of JavaScript and WebAssembly. When SpiderMonkey’s optimizing compiler, Ion, is active, we can now produce interactive graphs showing exactly how functions are processed and optimized. You can play with these graphs right here on this page. Simply write some JavaScript code in the test function and see what graph is produced
I spend an awful lot of my day in Unix terminals running shell commands. For some reason, the variance in efficiency between different people when using the shell is huge: I know people who can run rings around me, and I’ve come across more than one paid professional who doesn’t use the “up” key to retrieve the previous command. I chose that last example very deliberately: most of the commands mos
I recently spoke to a developer who tried blogging but gave up because nobody was reading his posts. I checked out his blog, and it was immediately obvious why he didn’t have any readers. The developer had interesting insights, but he made so many mistakes in presenting his ideas that he was driving everyone away. The tragedy was that these errors were easy to fix. Once you learn to recognize them
Try Mastering Emacs for free! Are you struggling with the basics? Have you mastered movement and editing yet? When you have read Mastering Emacs you will understand Emacs. It’s that time again: there’s a new major version of Emacs and, with it, a treasure trove of new features and changes. Notable features include the formal inclusion of native compilation, a technique that will greatly speed up y
Type Parameters Proposal
Ian Lance Taylor Robert Griesemer August 20, 2021 StatusThis is the design for adding generic programming using type parameters to the Go language. This design has been proposed and accepted as a future language change. We currently expect that this change will be available in the Go 1.18 release in early 2022. AbstractWe suggest extending the Go language to add optional type parameters to type an
A typical PyTorch training program on 8 GPUs with 4 dataloaderworkers per GPU would create at least processes.A naive use of PyTorch dataset and dataloader can easilyreplicate your dataset's RAM usage by 40 times. This issue has probably affected everyone who has done anything nontrivial with PyTorch.In this post, we will explain why it happens, and how to avoid the 40x RAM usage. All code example
I stumbled across Exercism last year and was immediately charmed. It's a website devoted to teaching programming languages. It's got a great UI, offers free mentoring (by a human!), and is entirely open source. Last January, they announced a new program called 12in23, where they challenged participants to try 12 new programming languages in 2023. Each month would have a theme (such as "Analytical
A Lisp REPL as my main shell
If you enjoy this article and would like to help me keep writing, consider chipping in, every little bit helps to keep me going :) Thank you! Update: As of 2021-02-07, not all the code and configurations used in this presentation have been published. Should happen in the coming days, stay tuned! Introduction video The concepts I’m going to present in this article were featured in a presentation at
A Deep Dive into eBPF: Writing an Efficient DNS Monitoring.
eBPF / XDP is an in-kernel virtual machine, provides a high-level library, instruction set and an execution environment inside the Linux kernel. It’s used in many Linux kernel subsystems, most prominently networking, tracing, debugging and security. Including to modify the processing of packets in the kernel and also allows the programming of network devices such as SmartNICs. Use cases in eBPF im
Julia 1.0 came out well over 2 years ago. Since then a lot has changed and a lot hasn’t. Julia 1.0 was a commitment to no breaking changes, but that is not to say no new features have been added to the language. Julia 1.6 is a huge release and it is coming out relatively soon. RC-1 was released recently. I suspect we have at least a few more weeks before the final release. The Julia Core team take
Cognitive load is what matters
The logo image was taken from Reddit. It is a living document, last update: May 2025. Your contributions are welcome! Introduction There are so many buzzwords and best practices out there, but most of them have failed. We need something more fundamental, something that can't be wrong. Sometimes we feel confusion going through the code. Confusion costs time and money. Confusion is caused by high co
Flipping Pages: An analysis of a new Linux vulnerability in nf_tables and hardened exploitation techniques
This blogpost is the next instalment of my series of hands-on no-boilerplate vulnerability research blogposts, intended for time-travellers in the future who want to do Linux kernel vulnerability research. Specifically, I hope beginners will learn from my VR workflow and the seasoned researchers will learn from my techniques. In this blogpost, I'm discussing a bug I found in nf_tables in the Linux
LambdaLisp - A Lisp Interpreter That Runs on Lambda Calculus
LambdaLisp is a Lisp interpreter written as an untyped lambda calculus term. The input and output text is encoded into closed lambda terms using the Mogensen-Scott encoding, so the entire computation process solely consists of the beta-reduction of lambda calculus terms. When run on a lambda calculus interpreter that runs on the terminal, it presents a REPL where you can interactively define and e
The logo image was taken from Reddit. It is a living document, last update: May 2025. Your contributions are welcome! Introduction There are so many buzzwords and best practices out there, but most of them have failed. We need something more fundamental, something that can't be wrong. Sometimes we feel confusion going through the code. Confusion costs time and money. Confusion is caused by high co
Here is a list of common JavaScript interview questions with detailed answers to help you prepare for the interview as a JavaScript developer. JavaScript continues to be a cornerstone of web development, powering dynamic and interactive experiences across the web. As the language evolves, so does the complexity and scope of interview questions for JavaScript developers. Whether you’re a fresher de
A History of Clojure
71 A History of Clojure RICH HICKEY, Cognitect, Inc., USA Shepherd: Mira Mezini, Technische Universität Darmstadt, Germany Clojure was designed to be a general-purpose, practical functional language, suitable for use by professionals wherever its host language, e.g., Java, would be. Initially designed in 2005 and released in 2007, Clojure is a dialect of Lisp, but is not a direct descendant of any
Combobulate: Structured Movement and Editing with Tree-Sitter
Combobulate: Structured Movement and Editing with Tree-Sitter Combobulate is a package that adds advanced structured editing and movement to many programming modes in Emacs. Here's how it works, and how it can enrich your editing experience in Emacs. About a year ago I released an alpha – prototype, really – version of a tool I call Combobulate. I’d been using it personally for a while before I le
Terminal internals are a mess. A lot of it is just the way it is because someone made a decision in the 80s and now it’s impossible to change. —Julia Evans This is what you have to do to redesign infrastructure. Rich [Hickey] didn't just pile some crap on top of Lisp [when building Clojure]. He took the entire Lisp and moved the whole design at once. —Gary Bernhardt a mental model of a terminal At
Python Interview Questions
Here is a list of common Python interview questions with detailed answers to help you prepare for the interview as a Python developer. Python, with its versatile use cases and straightforward syntax, has seen its popularity growing continuously in software development, data science, artificial intelligence, and many other fields. As such, interviews for Python-related positions are designed not on
What does it mean for a BPF application to be portable? And why it's actually hard to achieve that without BPF Compile Once — Run Everywhere (CO-RE)? In this post we'll see what are the challenges of writing BPF programs that can work across multiple kernel versions and how BPF CO-RE is helping to address this problem. This post was originally posted on Facebook's BPF blog. If you are curious abou
Key InsightsRust is the first industry-supported programming language to overcome the longstanding trade-off between the safety guarantees of higher-level languages and the control over resource management provided by lower-level systems programming languages.It tackles this challenge using a strong type system based on the ideas of ownership and borrowing, which statically prohibits the mutation
Django for Startup Founders: A better software architecture for SaaS startups and consumer apps
In an ideal world, startups would be easy. We'd run our idea by some potential customers, build the product, and then immediately ride that sweet exponential growth curve off into early retirement. Of course it doesn't actually work like that. Not even a little. In real life, even startups that go on to become billion-dollar companies typically go through phases like: Having little or no growth fo
[Simon Tatham, initial version 2023-09-01, last updated 2025-03-25] [Coroutines trilogy: C preprocessor | C++20 native | general philosophy ] Introduction Why I’m so enthusiastic about coroutines The objective view: what makes them useful? Versus explicit state machines Versus conventional threads The subjective view: why do I like them so much? “Teach the student when the student is ready” They s
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Writing a C compiler in 500 lines of Python
Tales of the M1 GPU - Asahi Linux
Prototyping in Rust | corrode Rust Consulting
Recto — a truly 2D language
Kalyn: a self-hosting compiler for x86-64
Zig, Rust, and other languages | notes.eatonphil.com
Home - Playing with code
0.10.0 Release Notes ⚡ The Zig Programming Language
Let's Write a Tree-Sitter Major Mode
Who needs Graphviz when you can build it yourself?
Laurence Tratt: Better Shell History Search
How to Write Blog Posts that Developers Read
What's New in Emacs 28.1?
Demystify RAM Usage in Multi-Process Data Loaders
12 Languages in 12 Months
Julia 1.6: what has changed since Julia 1.0?
Cognitive load is what matters
JavaScript Interview Questions
the terminal of the future
BPF CO-RE (Compile Once – Run Everywhere)
Safe Systems Programming in Rust – Communications of the ACM
Philosophy of coroutines