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sin-ack's writings
Personal blog · sin-ack.github.ioprogrammingsystems
sin-ack's writings is a personal blog at sin-ack.github.io about programming and systems. Since 2021, 9 different Hacker News readers have linked it 14 times, most often “ZigSelf: An Implementation of Self in Zig”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-12-08, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (3) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this blog for posts on Morphic, the Zig port to SerenityOS, and Self and Smalltalk topics. The comments cite the posts as background or pointers rather than judging them.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 3 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Self-important monologues.
Most-linked posts?
- ZigSelf: An Implementation of Self in Zig3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2022-03-01
- An introduction to Morphic: Self's UI toolkit3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-01-18
- I Tried Porting Zig to SerenityOS2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-10-19
- Malloc broke Serenity's JPGLoader, or: how to win the lottery2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2021-06-02
What Hacker News says?
What was really interesting about Self was its optimizability - they were able to implement a Smalltalk on Self that was much faster than the contemporary Smalltalk systems. The impression I got from poking around at Self was that there was a class/inheritance system informally approximated in the prototypical relations of the objects and traits, but that doesn't mean you can't formally define one. For anyone curiou…
Comment linking /posts/zigself-01/
on “Lisp, Smalltalk, and the power of symmetry (2014)”Submitted Malloc broke Serenity's JPGLoader, or: how to win the lottery as a story · 335 points
HN discussionHello friends! For more details, here's a blog post that sin-ack wrote about the porting work: https://sin-ack.github.io/posts/sycl-talk-20221007/ He also gave an in-person talk about Zig on SerenityOS at Software You Can Love 2022, there's a video of the talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug3p8vELJqQ
Comment linking /posts/sycl-talk-20221007/
on “The Zig programming language has been ported to SerenityOS”Submitted Malloc broke Serenity's JPGLoader, or: how to win the lottery (2021) as a story · 235 points
HN discussionMorphic started on Self actually, maybe start there? I am unaware how it evolved since then, especially given the differences between Self and Smalltalk. https://handbook.selflanguage.org/2017.1/morphic.html https://sin-ack.github.io/posts/morphic-intro/
Comment linking /posts/morphic-intro/
on “Squeak/Smalltalk 6.1 Release Notes”Submitted An introduction to Morphic: Self's UI toolkit as a story · 57 points
HN discussionhttps://sin-ack.github.io/ I (very occasionally) write about stuff that I'm interested in. The focus is on the Self programming language but I also have things about Zig and SerenityOS.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?”Submitted I Tried Porting Zig to SerenityOS as a story · 36 points
HN discussionSubmitted ZigSelf: An Implementation of Self in Zig as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted A Tour of Self as a story · 4 points
HN discussionSubmitted ZigSelf: An Implementation of Self in Zig as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSubmitted The inner workings of ZigSelf's actor model as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted A look at Self's object system as a story · 2 points
HN discussionSubmitted An introduction to Morphic: Self's UI toolkit as a story · 2 points
HN discussion