Top all-time · #2623
Renato Athaydes
Personal blog · renato.athaydes.com/postsprogramming
Renato Athaydes's personal blog at renato.athaydes.com covers programming. Since 2019, 29 different Hacker News readers have linked it 46 times, most often “Revisiting Prechelt’s paper comparing Java, Lisp, C/C++ and scripting languages”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Too few sampled comments (19) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Renato Athaydes's posts on running Java in the browser (TeaVM, CheerpJ) with benchmarks, on Lisp performance against Java and Rust, and on a Unison review, as data for language comparisons.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 19 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- Revisiting Prechelt’s paper comparing Java, Lisp, C/C++ and scripting languages6 people · 9 mentions · first linked 2021-07-26
- Comparing JVM alternatives to JavaScript4 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2019-04-21
- How to write slow Rust code4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-08-02
- Optimising Common Lisp to try and beat Java and Rust on phone encoding 2/23 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-10-11
- A look at Unison: a revolutionary programming language3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-01-09
- Zig comptime: does anything come close?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-01-16
- How to write fast Rust code2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-08-15
- Taking Project Loom for a spin (Java virtual/green Threads)2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-05-17
- Interesting features of the Dart programming language2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2019-07-07
- How to write slow Rust code – Part 22 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-08-09
What Hacker News says?
I don't think that's the same thing (rather, it's more like ordinary Zig variables in code that's evaluated at compile-time), as there's no arbitrary mixing of compile-time and runtime computation. Again, compare with https://ziglang.org/documentation/master/#Case-Study-print-i... Anyway, I found this article that concludes that D's compile time evaluation is equivalent in power to Zig's, although it also doesn't co…
Comment linking /posts/comptime-programming
on “Things Zig comptime won't do”Submitted Learning Common Lisp to beat Java and Rust on a phone encoding problem as a story · 337 points
HN discussionIf that's your main downside, that's pretty good, since clunkiness is in many ways fixable. Personally with standard CL I like to use property lists with keywords, so a "map literal" is just (list :a 3 :b 'other). It's fine when the map is small. The getter is just getf, setting is the usual setf around the getter. There's a cute way to loop by #'cddr for a key-and-value loop, though Alexandria (a very common utilit…
Comment linking /posts/how-to-write-slow-rust-code.html
on “Porting SBCL to the Nintendo Switch”Submitted Comparing JVM alternatives to JavaScript as a story · 123 points
HN discussionI've found this helpful review on Unison albeit the article is from 2023 [1]. [1] A look at Unison: a revolutionary programming language: https://renato.athaydes.com/posts/unison-revolution.html
Comment linking /posts/unison-revolution.html
on “Unison 1.0”Submitted Revisiting Prechelt’s paper comparing Java, Lisp, C/C++ and scripting languages as a story · 118 points
HN discussionI think it was this blog: https://renato.athaydes.com/all-posts They also tested common lisp!
Comment linking /all-posts
on “Java at 30: Interview with James Gosling”Submitted How to write slow Rust code as a story · 107 points
HN discussion31.55KB transferred according to Chrome for the sample app here: http://teavm.org/live-examples/todomvc/#/ Compared to React, GWT, Vaadin, and CheerpJ, TeaVM comes out on top for Lighthouse scores and JavaScript size: https://renato.athaydes.com/posts/comparing-jvm-alternatives...
Comment linking /posts/comparing-jvm-alternatives-to-js.html
on “TeaVM: Build Fast, Modern Web Apps in Java”Submitted Optimising Common Lisp to try and beat Java and Rust on phone encoding 2/2 as a story · 78 points
HN discussionThrow away your preconceived notions -- TeaVM beat React at its own game. * Faster startup * Better Lighthouse score * Less code See for yourself: https://renato.athaydes.com/posts/comparing-jvm-alternatives...
Comment linking /posts/comparing-jvm-alternatives-to-js.html
on “TeaVM: Build Fast, Modern Web Apps in Java”Submitted Creating Lisp Systems as a story · 6 points
HN discussionLisp as an alternative to Java, still, in 2021 (and C++ and Rust[1]): https://renato.athaydes.com/posts/revisiting-prechelt-paper-... [1] talking about speed
Comment linking /posts/revisiting-prechelt-paper-comparing-languages.html
on “Lisp as an Alternative to Java (2000)”Submitted How to write slow Rust code – Part 2 as a story · 6 points
HN discussionThe next blog post goes into more detail regarding possible optimizations. https://renato.athaydes.com/posts/how-to-write-slow-rust-cod... The JVM startup time is discussed, and it mentions that a pre-compiled version using Graal might make for an interesting comparison. It wasn't done, because as mentioned in the blog post, things were getting out of hand with all the extra testing.
Comment linking /posts/how-to-write-slow-rust-code.html
on “Revisiting Prechelt’s paper comparing Java, Lisp, C/C++ and scripting languages”Submitted Revisiting Prechelt’s paper comparing Java, Lisp, C/C++ & scripting languages as a story · 6 points
HN discussionThe classic, now quiet dated citation, is "An empirical comparison of C, C++, Java, Perl, Python, Rexx, and Tcl" by Lutz Prechelt. Recent-ish commentary (July 2021) about it at https://renato.athaydes.com/posts/revisiting-prechelt-paper-... , HN commentary at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28108806 . Google Scholar gives about 476 paper which cite Prechelt's work. I have not followed other work in that field.
Comment linking /posts/revisiting-prechelt-paper-comparing-languages.html
on “Selecting a programming language can be a form of premature optimization”Submitted A look at Unison: a revolutionary programming language as a story · 5 points
HN discussionA recent blog post discussing some other ways to run Java in the browser: https://renato.athaydes.com/posts/comparing-jvm-alternatives... I currently use TeaVM and it's excellent, but I'll give J2CL a try.
Comment linking /posts/comparing-jvm-alternatives-to-js.html
on “J2cl: Transpile Java to JavaScript for Closure Compiler”Submitted Testing and building C projects with Zig as a story · 5 points
HN discussionIf you're seeking performance, stick to Common Lisp? https://renato.athaydes.com/posts/how-to-write-slow-rust-cod... they sweat to great lengths to beat the non-optimized original Lisp program^^ (for ML-style type checking, check out the newly released Coalton library) TLDR; when talking Lisp, CL has still much to show.
Comment linking /posts/how-to-write-slow-rust-code.html
on “Ketos: Lisp dialect scripting and extension language for Rust programs”Submitted The difficult problem of managing Java dependencies as a story · 4 points
HN discussionThe new release of TeaVM (0.11.0) now supports WebAssembly GC. This increases performance while further decoupling TeaVM apps from ECMAScript. TeaVM ( https://teavm.org/ ) is an Apache-licensed project, free for use in commercial projects. It is mature and used widely, including in frameworks like Flavour ( https://frequal.com/Flavour/book.html ) and more projects listed here: https://www.frequal.com/TeaVM/TeaVmBase…
Comment linking /posts/comparing-jvm-alternatives-to-js.html
on “New Java to WASM GC Transpiler: Run Java in the Browser, No Plugin Required”Submitted Revisiting Prechelt’s paper comparing Java, Lisp, C/C++ and scripting languages as a story · 4 points
HN discussionI'm also very curious for hear from expert lispers. I've tried to find the sweat spot where lisp would fit better than what I already know: shell for glue and file ops, R for data munging and vis, python to not reinvent things, perl/core-utils for one liners. But before I can find the niche, I get turned off by the amount of ceremony -- or maybe just how different the state and edit/evaluate loop is. I'm holding ont…
Comment linking /posts/revisiting-prechelt-paper-comparing-languages.html
on “Learn Lisp the Hard Way”Submitted Zig comptime: does anything come close? as a story · 3 points
HN discussionThere is a fun blog series about comparison and tweaks of the same problem between java, rust and CL. I will link only the last part of the series[1], but the general take is that SBCL performs comparably to a heavily optimized java implementation, and can even hold a candle to rust and java on short runs. [1] https://renato.athaydes.com/posts/revenge_of_lisp-part-2.htm...
Comment linking /posts/revenge_of_lisp-part-2.html
on “I Still ‘Lisp’ (and You Should Too)”Submitted How I wrote my own Smart Home software as a story · 3 points
HN discussion(they are using Webkit for the browser) funny story on Lisp's performance (compared to Java and Rust): https://renato.athaydes.com/posts/revisiting-prechelt-paper-... CL was beating Rust out of the water (in speed) with its un-optimized algorithm, that the post author copied from a Lisp manual. After much sweating, Rust eventually beat CL's version.
Comment linking /posts/revisiting-prechelt-paper-comparing-languages.html
on “Why Lisp?”Submitted How to write fast Rust code as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
