Top all-time · #193
Andy Wingo
Personal blog · wingolog.org · on HN as wingoprogrammingsystems
Andy Wingo writes wingolog, a personal blog at wingolog.org about programming and systems. Since 2007, 237 different Hacker News readers have linked it 518 times, most often “An opinionated guide to Scheme implementations (2013)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-05-16, and you can follow it by feed.
Sometimes recommended · 13 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link wingolog for writing on Guile Scheme, V8 internals, compilers, concurrency and JavaScript engines, and recommend it as a reference.
- Recommended for · 13 comments
- Called a useful comparison, a good series, a comprehensive V8 reference, a sound argument and worth following.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
wingolog: A mostly dorky weblog by Andy Wingo
Most-linked posts?
- An opinionated guide to Scheme implementations (2013)6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2013-01-07
- An opinionated guide to scheme implementations (2013)6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2016-04-27
- A world to win: WebAssembly for the rest of us6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2023-03-20
- /6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2011-10-17
- Value Representation in JavaScript Implementations6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2011-05-19
- Thoughts on Rms and Gnu5 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2019-10-08
- /5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2010-10-22
- The GNU extension language5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2011-08-30
- A New Concurrent ML5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2017-06-29
- Static single assignment for functional programmers5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2015-08-14
What Hacker News says?
Not considering the many holes, cyphersuites, running TLS 1.3+ etc. ( http://wingolog.org/archives/2014/10/17/ffs-ssl ) ...it should probably look like this: Safe against active attacks: Encrypted (Certified) COOL GREEN Safe against passive attacks: Encrypted (Self-Signed) SCARY ORANGE Safe against world peace, ie. UNSAFE: Unencrypted EVIL RED
Comment linking /archives/2014/10/17/ffs-ssl
on “Launching in 2015: A Certificate Authority to Encrypt the Entire Web”Submitted FFS SSL as a story · 447 points
HN discussionIt’s also 2024 and you still can’t share JavaScript objects between threads. Do not underestimate the horror that is tracing garbage collection with multiple mutator threads. (Here[1] is Guile maintainer Andy Wingo singing praises to the new, simpler way to do it... in 2023, referring to a research paper from 2008 that he came across a year before that post.) [1] https://wingolog.org/archives/2023/02/07/whippet-towa…
Comment linking /archives/2023/02/07/whippet-towards-a-new-local-maximum
on “Zed on Linux Is Here”Submitted Firefox's low-latency WebAssembly compiler as a story · 375 points
HN discussionThanks for finding those resources. In this one: https://wingolog.org/archives/2019/10/08/thoughts-on-rms-and... He says: "The result, sadly, is that a significant proportion of those that have stuck with GNU don't see any problems with RMS." Yes, isn't it sad that so many don't see any problems with RMS. What can we do about that? How can we make people see problems with RMS? This is despicable activism.
Comment linking /archives/2019/10/08/thoughts-on-rms-and-gnu
on “Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF”Submitted WebAssembly: The New Kubernetes? as a story · 328 points
HN discussionPeople part of the GNU movement say "we owe a debt of gratitude to Richard Stallman for his decades of important work in the free software movement". Andy Wingo said "he created GNU, speaking it into existence via prophetic narrative and via code; yes, he inspired many people, myself included, to make the vision of a GNU system into a reality; and yes, he should be recognized for these things." They also say: "Yet,…
Comment linking /archives/2019/10/08/thoughts-on-rms-and-gnu
on “Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF”Submitted BigInt Shipping in Firefox as a story · 327 points
HN discussionStallman is a bastion of software freedom in a world turning progressively dark. The fact that he never ever compromised his ideals and principles, never sold out and has been repeatedly proven prescient and absolutely on the money on countless issues, makes him someone that we should strive to protect. There are many invididuals in the Free Software world that backstabbed RMS and tried to destroy him with malicious…
Comment linking /archives/2019/10/08/thoughts-on-rms-and-gnu
on “Richard Stallman is coming back to the board of the FSF”Submitted Spectre and the end of langsec as a story · 264 points
HN discussionThe dolphin emulator's blog is doing awesome blog posts as usual. Reminds me of how JavaScript compilers[1] also compile several versions of the same function, as the interpreter gains more insight on how the function is used. [1] https://wingolog.org/archives/2011/07/05/v8-a-tale-of-two-co... (Wow, 2011, time goes by fast)
Comment linking /archives/2011/07/05/v8-a-tale-of-two-compilers
on “Ubershaders: A Ridiculous Solution to an Impossible Problem”Submitted Tree-shaking, the horticulturally misguided algorithm (2023) as a story · 247 points
HN discussionhumble opinion: N years of using any language won't make you an expert. There's knowledge about how to express certain patterns in a given language, more like an application design expertise. There's knowledge and familiarity with the APIs. And then there's the deep language knowledge, the one that pretty much only someone implementing a language VM, parser, compiler and other tools may acquire with time. Also, ther…
Comment linking /tags/javascript
on “Eloquent JavaScript 3rd Edition (2018)”Submitted Guix on the Framework 13 AMD as a story · 247 points
HN discussionThe best blogs don't have daily content. In fact, the best blogs usually post once a month, or less - often much less. Here are some: http://prog21.dadgum.com http://www.moserware.com http://ridiculousfish.com/blog http://wingolog.org/
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What programming blogs do you read daily?”Submitted Generators in Firefox now 22 times faster as a story · 231 points
HN discussionI do want to argue the point. :) The strange miracle of open source software is that when companies use something like Redis to make a lot of money, they end up investing in it, they contribute work to the project, and the community does gain from their contributions. In other words, the whole point of OSS is that exactly the thing you say never happens, happens all the time . Most open source development is commerc…
Comment linking /archives/2014/11/14/generators-in-firefox-now-twenty-two-times-faster
on “Side projects”Submitted Missing the Point of WebAssembly as a story · 199 points
HN discussionI often find that DRY is in conflict with Conway's law[1]. It's almost always better to let Conway's law win. If I help write a build script for one team, I often copy and paste it into another's git repo to instead of trying to share it. It's often way better than factoring it poorly[2] or getting the two teams to coordinate on changes they need to make to it. Best to let the two copies diverge in that case. 1: htt…
Comment linking /archives/2015/11/09/embracing-conways-law
on “DRY is an over-rated programming principle?”Submitted Conservative GC can be faster than precise GC as a story · 144 points
HN discussionFor a more comprehensive reference on v8 internals, there is http://wingolog.org/tags/v8 , which has been around for a long time. It is even directly referenced from https://developers.google.com/v8/under_the_hood . I don't think there's anything in this post that wasn't already explained in this reference, except the fact that now there's Ignition and TurboFan, but that doesn't fundamentally change anything.
Comment linking /tags/v8
on “How JavaScript works: inside the V8 engine”Submitted Baffled by generational garbage collection – wingolog as a story · 141 points
HN discussionA giant shout-out to Igalia (Caitlin Potter!), who were instrumental in getting this implemented and shipped! https://blogs.igalia.com/compilers/2016/05/23/awaiting-the-f... This joins generators[1][2][3] (Andy Wingo) and arrow functions[4][5] (Adrian Perez de Castro, Andy Wingo) as examples of the community (read: not employees of Mozilla, Google, Apple, Microsoft) directly working on the engines to ship these feat…
Comment linking /archives/2015/06/18/arrow-functions-coming-to-chrome-45
on “Async/await support in Firefox”Submitted Just-in-time code generation within WebAssembly as a story · 131 points
HN discussionThis page has a useful comparison between various scheme implementations. It's written by one of the authors of Guile Scheme: https://wingolog.org/archives/2013/01/07/an-opinionated-guid...
Comment linking /archives/2013/01/07/an-opinionated-guide-to-scheme-implementations
on “Chez Scheme is now free”Submitted Lightweight Concurrency in Lua as a story · 128 points
HN discussionThere are several problems with bringing your own GC. Some that come to mind: * Significantly increased binary size * No easy way to trace heap objects shared amongst many modules * Efficient GC needs parallelism, currently limited in Wasm For a more thorough explanation, see https://wingolog.org/archives/2023/03/20/a-world-to-win-weba...
Comment linking /archives/2023/03/20/a-world-to-win-webassembly-for-the-rest-of-us
on “Google Sheets ported its calculation worker from JavaScript to WasmGC”Submitted V8 Garbage Collector as a story · 125 points
HN discussionThe approach taken by Igalia (a co-op) is quite interesting: https://wingolog.org/archives/2013/06/25/time-for-money . Basically they target equal pay but adjust it for cost of living, rather than cost of hiring.
Comment linking /archives/2013/06/25/time-for-money
on “What it was like working for Gitlab”Submitted High-Performance Packet Filtering with Pflua as a story · 125 points
HN discussion
