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Down with the friction
Personal blog · cbarrete.comprogrammingsystems
Down with the friction is a personal blog at cbarrete.com about programming and systems. Since 2022, 11 different Hacker News readers have linked it 12 times, most often “Carmack on inlined code and functional programming”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-17, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this site for John Carmack's writing, mainly his email on inlining code and a longer version that also includes his 2012 thoughts. They cite it when discussing code structure.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Carmack on inlined code and functional programming7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2022-08-02
- I don't love Rust (either)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2025-11-09
What Hacker News says?
There is a longer version of this thought-provoking post, also including Carmack's thoughts in 02012, at https://cbarrete.com/carmack.html . But maybe that version has not also had threads about it.
Comment linking /carmack.html
on “John Carmack on inlined code (2014)”Submitted C++ move semantics from scratch (2022) as a story · 80 points
HN discussionRight. Pure functions make it considerably easier to reason about code, even in the absence of concurrency. It's a shame D's pure modifier (to statically guarantee purity) isn't available in many other languages. [0] SPARK Ada has something similar in that functions must always be pure, forcing procedures to be used for impure functionality. [1] edit I think that's mistaken, SPARK appears to permit functions to read…
Comment linking /carmack.html
on “Why study functional programming? (2012)”Submitted I don't love Rust (either) as a story · 7 points
HN discussionMy favorite is his email on inlining code: https://cbarrete.com/carmack.html
Comment linking /carmack.html
on “Carmack on Operating Systems (1997)”Submitted I don't love Rust (either) as a story · 6 points
HN discussion> Golangs stupidly verbose error handling forces you to constantly think about the unhappy paths. Every function is littered with error handling and it makes you aware of possible problems and rigorously forces you to not forget them. That reminds me of this [1]: > However, if you are going to make a lot of state changes, having them all happen inline does have advantages; you should be made constantly aware of the…
Comment linking /carmack.html
on “Why I Prefer Exceptions to Error Values”Submitted Just how slow are slow languages? as a story · 2 points
HN discussion>where each line is extracted into its own method As John Carmack said: "if a lot of operations are supposed to happen in a sequential fashion, their code should follow sequentially" ( https://cbarrete.com/carmack.html ). A single method with a few lines is easy to read, like the processor reading a single cache line, while having to jump around between methods is distracting and slow, like the processor having to r…
Comment linking /carmack.html
on “Maybe Comments _Should_ Explain 'What'”Submitted Carmack on inlined code and functional programming as a story · 1 points
HN discussionThe question is why? Why do you think reading books is a more valuable use of your time than reading posts or watching video essays. Anybody can look at an immature medium and write it off as a waste of time. In 100 years parents will tell children to scroll tiktok instead of playing on the Zorp, don't you want to be part of that rather than the footnote, 'Oh yeah people were still writing scrolls in the 1700s'. Boo…
Comment linking /carmack.html
on “How to Read More Books”Submitted I don't love Rust (either) (2021) as a story · 1 points
HN discussion
