Top all-time · #7209
Alexander Grebenyuk
Personal blog · kean.blogprogramming
Alexander Grebenyuk's personal blog at kean.blog covers programming. Since 2021, 11 different Hacker News readers have linked it 17 times, most often “Let's Build a Regex Engine (2019)”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-29, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (2) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Alexander Grebenyuk's blog for its post on building a simplified regex engine, and for a post on problems with Apple's developer documentation.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 2 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Articles by Alexander Grebenyuk (@kean) on programming for Apple platforms (iOS, Swift, Objective-C, SwiftUI)
Most-linked posts?
- Let's Build a Regex Engine (2019)4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-05-24
- AppKit is done – macOS and SwiftUI2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-02-24
What Hacker News says?
It's not just you, nobody is more upset about Apple's documentation than the developers who are immersed in the environment.[1][2][3][4] [1]: https://www.caseyliss.com/2020/11/10/on-apples-pisspoor-docu... [2]: https://www.hackingwithswift.com/articles/231/reimagining-ap... [3]: https://mjtsai.com/blog/2019/05/20/the-state-of-apples-devel... [4]: https://kean.blog/post/apple-documentation
Comment linking /post/apple-documentation
on “Apple Design Resources”Submitted Let's Build a Regex Engine (2019) as a story · 155 points
HN discussionhttps://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall19/cos226/l... and https://kean.blog/post/lets-build-regex are excellent introductions to implementing a (very) simplified regex engine: construct a nondetermistic finite state automaton for the regex, then perform a graph search on the resulting digraph; if the vertex corresponding to your end state is reachable, you have a match. I think this exercise is valuable fo…
Comment linking /post/lets-build-regex
on “Regex Engine Internals as a Library”Submitted AppKit is done – macOS and SwiftUI as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted Pocket Casts Unfolded as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Swift 6 as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted Let's Build a Regex Engine (2019) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Time to Log as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted Pulse 3.0: a network logger built with Swift as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted AppKit Is Done (2021) as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Introducing CreateAPI as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Best Resources for iOS Engineers as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Best Resources for iOS Engineers as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Pulse: Logger and Network Inspector for Apple Platforms as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Let’s Build a Regex Engine as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted The SwiftUI Experiment as a story · 1 points
HN discussionSubmitted Concurrency Done Right as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
