Top all-time · #1306
Chad Austin
Personal blog · chadaustin.me · on HN as chadaustinprogrammingweb
Chad Austin's personal blog at chadaustin.me covers programming and web. Since 2009, 53 different Hacker News readers have linked it 87 times, most often “Unsafe Rust is harder than C”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-03-20, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 2 of 30 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Chad Austin's posts on performance, unsafe Rust, and terminal latency, plus his 'Logic vs. Array Processing' essay. Most comments cite them as sources or support.
- Recommended for · 2 comments
- Called illuminating and insightful, especially the 'Logic vs. Array Processing' post on performance.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 30 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Unsafe Rust is harder than C9 people · 12 mentions · first linked 2024-10-25
- Sum Types Are Coming (2015)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2016-08-18
- Two Years Working at Dropbox3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2019-12-01
- Microsoft Sculpt Wired Conversion Mod3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-02-22
- Terminal Latency on Windows (2024)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-04-08
- GraphQL Server in Haskell3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2016-02-10
- Writing a Fast JSON Parser2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-05-26
- Your Version Control and Build Systems Don't Scale2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-03-04
- The Story of Haskell at IMVU2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-06-14
- The Long-Term Problem with Dynamically Typed Languages2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2015-04-23
What Hacker News says?
Here's recent testing of Windows terminal latencies. It's 66ms in Microsoft's fancy new terminal. https://chadaustin.me/2024/02/windows-terminal-latency/
Comment linking /2024/02/windows-terminal-latency/
on “How much faster are the Gnome 46 terminals?”Submitted I just wanted Emacs to look nice – Using 24-bit color in terminals as a story · 523 points
HN discussionI don’t know if it’s my setup or just Windows quirks but even Alacritty feels slower than Windows Terminal. You can also use Is It Snappy? from the App Store to test typing latency. It was made by Chad Austin who had problems similar to us. https://chadaustin.me/2017/04/announcing-is-it-snappy/
Comment linking /2017/04/announcing-is-it-snappy/
on “Okay, I Like WezTerm”Submitted Writing a Fast JSON Parser as a story · 316 points
HN discussionPlease explain the differences in typical aliasing rules between C and Rust. And please explain posts like https://chadaustin.me/2024/10/intrusive-linked-list-in-rust/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41947921 https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2022/1/30/unsafe-rust/
Comment linking /2024/10/intrusive-linked-list-in-rust/
on “Thoughts on Go vs. Rust vs. Zig”Submitted The Story of Haskell at IMVU as a story · 210 points
HN discussionThe term 'functional language' is not terribly useful these days. You can program in a functional style in many languages, just as you can program in an imperative style in Haskell or Scheme. Last year, I wrote an article [1] talking a little bit about this, arguing that the notion of 'language paradigms' is mostly a crutch to avoid thinking critically about what a language is. [1] https://chadaustin.me/2015/09/hask…
Comment linking /2015/09/haskell-is-not-a-purely-functional-language/
on “A founder's perspective on 4 years with Haskell”Submitted Unsafe Rust is harder than C as a story · 120 points
HN discussionI do not have any non-Rust resources off the top of my head, but I can give you some quickly looked up resources and enough phrases to search for that should help you in this endeavor. ADTs are Abstract Data Types[1][2][3]: > ADT is implementation independent. For example, it only describes what a data type List consists (data) and what are the operations it can perform, but it has no information about how the List…
Comment linking /2015/07/sum-types/
on “Assorted Thoughts on Zig and Rust”Submitted Terminal Latency on Windows (2024) as a story · 113 points
HN discussion> With unsafe you get exactly the same kind of semantics as C People seem to disagree. Unsafe Rust Is Harder Than C https://chadaustin.me/2024/10/intrusive-linked-list-in-rust/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41944121
Comment linking /2024/10/intrusive-linked-list-in-rust/
on “Zlib-rs is faster than C”Submitted Sum Types Are Coming (2015) as a story · 113 points
HN discussionFirst, let me say that I think Evan has done amazing work with Elm, and Elm is a very interesting language on several fronts. It is a positive contribution to the world, especially the idea that error messages can be great and compilers and type systems are tools. That said, I agree 100% that the ability to form abstractions is a critical part of any language that hopes to become a tool that larger teams and project…
Comment linking /tag/crux/
on “Elm is Wrong”Submitted Two Years Working at Dropbox as a story · 95 points
HN discussionI wonder if the author of the article would agree with you on that. He made a distinction between specialized services and general web applications, which reminded me of this article about why Go isn't necessarily a good fit for the latter: https://chadaustin.me/2016/04/two-kinds-of-servers/
Comment linking /2016/04/two-kinds-of-servers/
on “Rust is a hard way to make a web API”Submitted Your Version Control and Build Systems Don't Scale as a story · 94 points
HN discussionhttp://chadaustin.me/2014/09/connecting-c-and-javascript-on-...
Comment linking /2014/09/connecting-c-and-javascript-on-the-web-with-embind/
on “Clasp – A Common Lisp with LLVM back end and interoperation with C++”Submitted How I Lost 20 Pounds in 20 Weeks With My iPhone (or: Data is King) as a story · 89 points
HN discussionI seriously doubt that using Python bytecode rather than native code makes the application more lightweight. Here are the problems I see: 1. Code size: Bytecode instructions may be more compact than their native code counterparts, since the bytecode instructions are dealing with higher-level abstractions. But the dynamism of Python prevents some major optimizations. First, the bytecode has to include identifiers, si…
Comment linking /2009/02/logic-vs-array-processing/
on “Email made me miserable, so I decided to build my own email app from scratch”Submitted Mozilla’s Rejection of NativeClient Hurts the Open Web as a story · 85 points
HN discussionI love this topic and compiled a slew of related links last year: https://chadaustin.me/2015/11/crts-pixels-and-video-games/
Comment linking /2015/11/crts-pixels-and-video-games/
on “Accurate CRT Simulation”Submitted Microsoft Sculpt Wired Conversion Mod as a story · 84 points
HN discussionI happened to work at said company (IMVU) too, and wrote a lot of Haskell (after the codebase was established), and I think it's not fair to say "it didn't work". It also wasn't a smashing success. There were definitely advantages and disadvantages. Ultimately, as technical director, I supported Haskell, because I felt the advantages outweighed the disadvantages. I now work at Dropbox, which uses Go for the same pur…
Comment linking /2015/02/buffer-builder/
on “Four months with Haskell”Submitted Writing a Fast JSON Parser as a story · 65 points
HN discussionBitfields are hard! They are potentially unaligned, thus interact poorly with some language features, like pointers and references. And their size isn't a multiple of bytes, unlike any other value, which causes problems as well. They interact poorly with padding and the general idea of Rust ABIs that enables optimizations like reordering fields and using "niches" (invalid values) to find a more compact layout for st…
Comment linking /2015/07/sum-types/
on “Why Not Rust? (2020)”Submitted Thinking About Performance as a story · 60 points
HN discussionMan, I regret not spending more time on the quality of the code at IMVU. I'm not a big fan of rewriting from scratch, but we've basically scaled a prototype into a crazy successful business, and it's had some nontrivial effects. For example, product owners now believe that you may as well timebox all refactoring, because you can never get it all. I wrote about the hidden costs of dirty code a while back: http://chad…
Comment linking /2008/10/10-pitfalls-of-dirty-code/
on “Startup Suicide -- Rewriting the Code”Submitted Disabling kernel functions in your process (2009) as a story · 47 points
HN discussion> Choosing references as your default is insane, honestly. Safe Rust is akin to writing formally verified software in the mental and ergonomic overhead it incurs. That's not coincidental. I've come to the conclusion one of the biggest mistakes of the community is not pushing pointer-only Rust harder, given they want it to be taken seriously as a systems language. That's an interesting perspective I hadn't heard befo…
Comment linking /2024/10/intrusive-linked-list-in-rust/
on “Initialization in C++ is bonkers (2017)”Submitted The Long-Term Problem with Dynamically Typed Languages as a story · 45 points
HN discussion
