LINKDING

The post has aged like good cheese: since 2015 we've moved on from callback syntax to async/await, but the debate about advantages and disadvantages of futures and microthreads remains open and this is a fantastic, clear way to picture it (even if opinionated in one direction).

I was surprised to see such a throwback to the classic PHP article. I can see a value in this article because it brings attention to a lot of gotchas and inconsistencies in the language that we should be aware of; I especially appreciate a good summary of inconsistencies around zero values. However there's a different point to be made here: Golang feels like a successful language to me. It has a purpose and fits this purpose really well. There's a lot of amazing pieces of software that I use regularly that Golang made possible. Maybe this means we should appreciate Go not as a "overall well designed language" but as a language that successfully solved a problem back when a compiled language with great tooling, concurrency and modules wasn't so readily accessible? This reminds me of how PHP successfully solved another important problem, despite its language design problems.

Surprised to see Go use more memory than Java in some benchmarks!

The thing that surprised me most about this article is how much ongoing effort there is to "upgrade" C++ to match the modern set of expectations, and how much friction it seems to face. I wasn't familiar with the historical events like the big ABI vote, so lots of learning here.

A nice walkthrough of all the differences between enums as in "overlapping memory" - known from C - and enums as in "variant types" implemented in rust.

Fantastic collab work which takes you to surprising places!

A comprehensive "first impressions" post! I was part of the 2013 hackathon so this article brings back a lot of memories when I re-read it in 2024. Especially socket.io was a big breakthrough for me: back when websockets were not that popular thing and Flash was still around, socket.io suddenly made it so easy to make interactive multi-user experiences. I was looking for all kinds of opportunities to use it.