Speedrunning a Compiler

When I last visited my parents, my mom and dad asked me whether I was worried about ChatGPT or other AI systems taking away programmers’ jobs and whether I was worried about my own future. My answer to them—and this might be a naïve take—is that I’m not very worried and that I think that programmers are going to be around for a while yet. The...

A discussion between Jonathan Blow and Casey Muratori on the handling of precedence in Jon’s compiler recently popped in my YouTube feed. The discussion is three hours and focuses on implementing operator precedence more easily and more simply in Jai using Pratt parsing. Jon and Casey also talk about the previous implementation of operator...

When Hare was announced back in 2022, I saw the post on Hacker News, went to the website, looked at the documentation, and my reaction was a lukewarm “meh”. Hare was a new entry in what I call the “Modern Cs”: languages that use C as their base inspiration and try to improve upon C by adding new features, removing some footguns, and polishing...

Most programmers have experienced that feeling of worthlessness and powerlessness when we are trying to implement what should be a simple change, but the existing code base resists our attempts. Worse, often we can see what is causing us to be blocked, yet we cannot bring ourselves to bring down those barriers. I call this the tyranny of existing...

In the talk Solving the Right Problems for Engine Programmers, Mike Acton spends a section of his talk on what he considers the three fundamental areas in which most programmers are incompetent: practice, reasonable defaults, problem solving skills. The first one in particular is quite interesting, because it enables the two others: someone who...