Top all-time · #1062
Nicholas Cameron
Personal blog · ncameron.org/blogprogrammingsystems
Nicholas Cameron's personal blog at ncameron.org covers programming and systems. Since 2014, 65 different Hacker News readers have linked it 80 times, most often “We need to talk about RFCs”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-08-18, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (15) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Nicholas Cameron's blog on Rust tooling, Cargo, the RLS, macro hygiene and language design. Commenters link his posts as sources on Rust tooling progress, async, and the RFC and macro background.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 15 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Nicholas Cameron is an experienced Rust engineer and educator offering Rust training, consultancy, and software development services.
Most-linked posts?
- We need to talk about RFCs4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-02-18
- Rust Through the Ages4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-05-08
- A response to 'A decade of developing a programming language'4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2023-12-01
- Rust in 20224 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-01-10
- Portable and Interoperable Async Rust3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-12-07
- Rust in 20233 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-12-12
- What the Rust Language Server Can Do2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2017-08-10
- My thoughts on Rust in 20162 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-01-06
- Recent Rust Changes2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-10-27
- Clarification/Correction of Rust in 20232 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-12-13
What Hacker News says?
That's true. More importantly, Rust and Kotlin work on improving things that matter to users, not on features that read nicely in a paper, but are largely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. Just compare Rust's announcement on tooling ( https://www.ncameron.org/blog/dev-tools-in-2018/ ) with the state in Scala, where pretty much every promised improvement has been "around the corner" for the last 5 years. :-/…
Comment linking /blog/dev-tools-in-2018/
on “Towards Scala 3”Submitted Rust in 2022 as a story · 125 points
HN discussionYes, I've been following this issue closely. Nick Cameron is working on a revamped macro system that will replace the current compiler plugin system for the purposes of syntax extensions. It's probably still gonna be a while, unfortunately, since it'll take some time to get that kind of stuff vetted and baked into the language. Here are some recent posts by Nick on his experiments and progress (in order of publicati…
Comment linking /blog/libmacro/
on “Announcing Rust 1.6”Submitted Cargo's next few years as a story · 110 points
HN discussionAgreed. I was very happy when it was announced in 2019 that Cargo got offline support: https://www.ncameron.org/blog/cargo-offline/ You can even prefetch popular libraries: https://crates.io/crates/cargo-prefetch
Comment linking /blog/cargo-offline/
on “Ask HN: Why is building Windows apps so complicated?”Submitted Portable and Interoperable Async Rust as a story · 97 points
HN discussionFaster compiler is nice, but you know what's faster? Not having to compile anything. I'm also looking forward to crates.io serving precompiled crates ( https://www.ncameron.org/blog/cargo-in-2019/ )
Comment linking /blog/cargo-in-2019/
on “The Rust compiler is still getting faster”Submitted Challenges for Rust as a story · 61 points
HN discussionThose three things already work in the RLS. And more: https://www.ncameron.org/blog/what-the-rls-can-do/
Comment linking /blog/what-the-rls-can-do/
on “Go: Ten years and climbing”Submitted Ten Challenges for Rust as a story · 11 points
HN discussionRust is very advanced, with things like higher-ranked trait bounds ( https://doc.rust-lang.org/nomicon/hrtb.html ) and generic associated types ( https://www.ncameron.org/rfcs/1598 ) that are difficult because they are essential complexity not accidental complexity.
Comment linking /rfcs/1598
on “Go's Sweet 16”Submitted Rust in 2022 as a story · 8 points
HN discussionHe wrote some decent articles before, and he might write some good ones in the future, but this right here, this ain't it. Unlike other "x in 2022" articles (for example https://www.ncameron.org/blog/rust-in-2022-2/ ), this one doesn't actually give any insight into the future of the language. Not only that, but there is no original content in it. He's simply repeating what he's been writing about for the past year.…
Comment linking /blog/rust-in-2022-2/
on “PHP in 2022”Submitted My thoughts on Rust in 2016 as a story · 8 points
HN discussionThe criticism is not directed at the LSP. RLS just implements the specification, but as you said LSP doesn't create these constraints. One outcome of all this might be that RLS internally gets replaced by something like rust-analyzer, which is something that the maintainer of RLS has mused in a recent blog post as one of many possible options for the future of RLS: https://www.ncameron.org/blog/more-on-rls-version-n…
Comment linking /blog/more-on-rls-version-numbering/
on “Rust Analyzer in 2018 and 2019”Submitted How the Rust Language Server Works as a story · 7 points
HN discussionI think you're describing "gradual typing", which had lots of promise and attention, but arguably achieves the worst of both worlds: https://www.ncameron.org/blog/a-response-to-a-decade-of-deve... What it comes down to is a reconciliation between these two views: https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/intrinsic+and+extrinsic+views+... I think the "reliability" you mentioned is "type safety". And I think the dynamicism I some…
Comment linking /blog/a-response-to-a-decade-of-developing-a-programming-language/
on “Lisping at JPL (2002)”Submitted Rust Through the Ages as a story · 5 points
HN discussionI'd expect something along the lines of: > Several recent studies have introduced lightweight versions of Java: reduced languages in which complex features like threads and reflection are dropped to enable rigorous arguments about key properties such as type safety. We carry this process a step further, omitting almost all features of the full language (including interfaces and even assignment) to obtain a small cal…
Comment linking /papers/index.html
on “Rust for C++ programmers – part 4: unique pointers”Submitted Rust 2018 as a story · 5 points
HN discussionYes: https://www.ncameron.org/blog/raft-paper/
Comment linking /blog/raft-paper/
on “How TiKV reads and writes”Submitted What the Rust Language Server Can Do as a story · 5 points
HN discussionRust plans to switch to sets of scopes algorithm for macros: http://www.ncameron.org/blog/sets-of-scopes-macro-hygiene/
Comment linking /blog/sets-of-scopes-macro-hygiene/
on “Binding as Sets of Scopes: Notes on a new model of macro expansion for Racket”Submitted Rust is about productivity as a story · 5 points
HN discussionExpanded read list on the same topic: http://www.ncameron.org/blog/sets-of-scopes-macro-hygiene/ https://github.com/acarrico/evaluator
Comment linking /blog/sets-of-scopes-macro-hygiene/
on “Binding as Sets of Scopes: Notes on a new model of macro expansion for Racket”Submitted Leaving Mozilla and (most of) the Rust project as a story · 4 points
HN discussionRust certainly wants to standardize the executors interface. People are working on it. See https://www.ncameron.org/blog/portable-and-interoperable-asy...
Comment linking /blog/portable-and-interoperable-async-rust/
on “Working with strings in Rust (2020)”Submitted Rust in 2022 as a story · 4 points
HN discussionAnd the follow-up clarification post: Clarification/correction of Rust in 2023: https://www.ncameron.org/blog/untitled-2/
Comment linking /blog/untitled-2/
on “Rust in 2023”Submitted What the Rust Language Server Can Do as a story · 4 points
HN discussion
