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Rich Dougherty
Personal blog · blog.richdougherty.comprogrammingphilosophy
Rich Dougherty's personal blog at blog.richdougherty.com covers programming and philosophy. Since 2009, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 9 times, most often “Tail calls, tailrec and trampolines (2009)”. The last post was in 2024, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link Rich Dougherty's posts on Scala and JVM tail calls, tailrec, trampolines and delimited continuations. One commenter said a post explains trampolines quite well.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Rich Dougherty’s personal website
Most-linked posts?
- Tail calls, tailrec and trampolines (2009)5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2014-03-19
- Goto considered awesome: Goto in Scala using delimited continuations2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2010-04-16
What Hacker News says?
I found this blog post to explain trampolines quite well: http://blog.richdougherty.com/2009/04/tail-calls-tailrec-and...
Comment linking /2009/04/tail-calls-tailrec-and-trampolines.html
on “Towards Scala 3”Submitted Tail calls, tailrec and trampolines (2009) as a story · 83 points
HN discussionThe stack doesn't have to be in the heap to make things better for recursion* , the JVM just needs to support tail-call optimisation. See my blog post: http://blog.richdougherty.com/2009/04/tail-calls-tailrec-and... I'm excited to see tail-call optimisation ("proper tail calls") coming to JavaScript. Hopefully a bit of competition will encourage the JVM to clean up its act too. http://bbenvie.com/articles/2013-01-06…
Comment linking /2009/04/tail-calls-tailrec-and-trampolines.html
on “JDK 8 Release Notes”Submitted Goto considered awesome: Goto in Scala using delimited continuations as a story · 25 points
HN discussionAdding more complexity to scala is its dependency on ASM for class file creation [1] and more refined performance options like tail-recursion [2] are implemented in a contrived fashion to make scala actually port to a non-standard JVM like dalvik .However if things were to change from ground-up like ARM actually made easy for functional programming. These facts actually can make porting a performance application to…
Comment linking /2009/04/tail-calls-tailrec-and-trampolines.html
on “Google, it's time – We want Scala for Android”Submitted Goto in Scala (2009) as a story · 2 points
HN discussionIf you need loops within loops, nothing stops you to have tailrec functions called within other tailrec functions. Any loop can be rewritten as a tailrec function and I prefer tailrec functions because it's easier to me to guard against invariants changing or to reason about branches or exit conditions. Plus with algebraic data-types, the compiler can warn you that you missed a branch. Etc... Also, the compiler does…
Comment linking /2009/04/tail-calls-tailrec-and-trampolines.html
on “Using Scala Will Make You Less Productive”Submitted Error handling with Scala's Try as a story · 1 points
HN discussionhttp://blog.richdougherty.com/2009/02/delimited-continuation... It sounds like you will only be able to do continuations within Scala code, not over a call-stack that includes Java/Scala transitions. (...which is entirely feasible. After all, many interpreters for continuation-friendly languages are built on top of C, which has no continuations.)
Comment linking /2009/02/delimited-continuations-in-scala_24.html
on “Scala 2.8 Preview”
