Jakob's Personal Webpage

Nearly every programming language has some flavor of "structure" declaration , where the programmer can conjure a new type representing the composition of other primitive types or structures, neatly organized into named fields. While the concept is practically universal, the way the programmer defines and interacts with these types can vary dramatically between languages. In Scheme, such structur…

In the introduction of the previous post I wrote for this series, First Impressions of the Rust Programming Language , I alluded to the presence of arguments that programming language safety should be achieved by moving to languages such as Java which run on a virtual machine. While "safety" may no longer be the first thing that comes to mind in discussion of these languages, especially with the …

This is a post I've been meaning to write for a while now: one anecdotally comparing programming languages in the Lisp family. I consider myself to be a Lisp hacker. Perhaps that much was obvious from the letter λ adorning my website's header, a reference to the λ-calculus which inspired John McCarthy to design the first LISP [1]. Yet, "Lisp hacker" likely means little unless you, too, consider y…

SDL2 is my favorite graphics library right now. It might not be as powerful as something like raw OpenGL, but it's simple. Simple enough that you can just pick it up and start using it. There's a glaring issue with it, though. The documentation is horrible. Absolutely horrible. A lot of it is unfinished, and it doesn't look like it's getting attention any time soon. The SDL1.2 documentation wasn'…

It seems that static linking is back in style, or at least popular among all the hip new programming languages of today. I don't have anything against statically linked binaries, nor do I have a problem with larger executables, but I've noticed that the acceptable size for an executable is a lot larger now than it was a few years ago; that is, the new kids on the block have significantly more lee…

It's been over a year since I last wrote about contenders for the throne that C currently sits upon, so I'll spare you the prosy introduction and cut to the chase. I'd like to share some thoughts on my recent foray into a little programming language I came across while browsing lobste.rs some years ago: Myrddin , the pet project of Ori Bernstein . From the language specification, "Myrddin is desi…

C is almost 50 years old, and C++ is almost 40 years old. While age is usually indicative of mature implementations with decades of optimization under their belts, it also means that the language's feature set is mostly devoid of modern advancements in programming language design. For that reason, you see a great deal of encouragement nowadays to move to newer languages - they're designed with co…