Top all-time · #2525
viralinstruction
Personal blog · viralinstruction.comprogrammingscience
viralinstruction is a personal blog at viralinstruction.com about programming and science. Since 2021, 30 different Hacker News readers have linked it 45 times, most often “What's bad about Julia?”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-12-05, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (16) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link viralinstruction for its Julia-focused posts, including a critique of Julia, a hardware guide for writing fast code, and notes on union versus sum types. Commenters find the posts helpful and measured.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 16 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Most-linked posts?
- What's bad about Julia?6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2021-07-26
- Julia's latency: Past, present and future4 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-03-31
- What scientists must know about hardware to write fast code4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2021-08-22
- A look at the Mojo language for bioinformatics3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-02-09
- Union vs. Sum Types3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2024-05-19
- In defense of complicated programming languages2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-01-23
- /posts/hardware/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-06-02
- How to optimise Julia code: A practical guide2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-06-08
- What's Great about Julia?2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-12-07
- Asynchronous Programming in Julia2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2025-02-08
What Hacker News says?
This is quite a good intro: https://viralinstruction.com/posts/badjulia/
Comment linking /posts/badjulia/
on “Python 3.13 Gets a JIT”Submitted What's bad about Julia? as a story · 326 points
HN discussionThe "feedback and answer" below the gist already covers a bunch of things I wanted to mention. So I'll skip those and only talk about the rest: > You can't make it a CLI script, because it compiles the whole code WITH dependencies every time The "with dependencies" part is mostly untrue nowadays, with constantly better pre-compiled caches for dependencies with every release. The overall issue of compile times gettin…
Comment linking /posts/badjulia/
on “Why I Chose Common Lisp”Submitted The borrowchecker is what I like the least about Rust as a story · 258 points
HN discussionThis has been very helpful to me: https://viralinstruction.com/posts/hardware/#74a3ddb4-8af1-1... It’s really not specific to Julia, though the language does let you drill down into the details nicely.
Comment linking /posts/hardware/
on “Ask HN: How can I learn about performance optimization?”Submitted In defense of complicated programming languages as a story · 209 points
HN discussionThis is an interesting read, thanks! I'm a bit surprised by https://viralinstruction.com/posts/badjulia/#julia_cant_easi... - I've been considering embedding Julia (as opposed to LuaJIT) in a project I'm working on that requires fast, mostly numerical computation. Based on https://docs.julialang.org/en/v1/manual/embedding/ , this seemed fairly simple, and as though I could avoid repeatedly paying the compile time la…
Comment linking /posts/badjulia/
on “What's bad about Julia?”Submitted A look at the Mojo language for bioinformatics as a story · 148 points
HN discussionAn opposing viewpoint on the issues of Julia from a user of Julia: "What's bad about Julia?" https://viralinstruction.com/posts/badjulia/
Comment linking /posts/badjulia/
on “Why We Use Julia, 10 Years Later”Submitted You probably don't need to validate UTF-8 strings as a story · 78 points
HN discussionVery interesting post, thanks for sharing. Do you have a link to your project code? Your experience seems to be in line with this post I read recently: https://viralinstruction.com/posts/badjulia/ It's written by a Julia fan, so it's a very lucid and measured take on the not so great side of Julia.
Comment linking /posts/badjulia/
on “Julia frameworks to create desktop GUIs and web apps”Submitted A look at the Mojo language for bioinformatics as a story · 22 points
HN discussionthere exist many high quality criticisms of Julia's type system, but this article does not contain them if I'm being totally honest. I think this writeup here https://viralinstruction.com/posts/badjulia/#the_type_system... contains more valid gripes about the type system than the one you linked.
Comment linking /posts/badjulia/
on “New horizons for Julia”Submitted Asynchronous Programming in Julia as a story · 7 points
HN discussion> ...I still want that kind of system, but I expect it would fail catastrophically in the real world Julia has its own version of the orphan rule called Type Piracy, which is merely discouraged instead of disallowed: https://viralinstruction.com/posts/latency/#a_brief_primer_o... It's not a net gain, but rather a different tradeoff.
Comment linking /posts/latency/
on “Traits are a local maximum”Submitted What's Bad about Julia? as a story · 5 points
HN discussionHey all, author here. That link is to an older version of the post - an updated version can be found here: https://viralinstruction.com/posts/hardware/
Comment linking /posts/hardware/
on “What scientists must know about hardware to write fast code (2020)”Submitted How to optimise Julia code: A practical guide as a story · 5 points
HN discussion> A major goal of Clang was to be a “compatible replacement” for GCC, MSVC and other existing compilers. It is hard to make a direct comparison, but the complexity of the Clang problem appears to be an order of magnitude bigger than implementing a compatible replacement for Python. The journey there gives good confidence we can do this right for the Python community Is it though? For Mojo to be a compatible replacem…
Comment linking /posts/latency/
on “Mojo – a new programming language for AI developers”Submitted What's Great about Julia? as a story · 4 points
HN discussionsee https://viralinstruction.com/posts/mojo/ . this compares a Rust parser that does some validation to a Mojo "parser" that doesn't do any.
Comment linking /posts/mojo/
on “Outperforming Rust DNA sequence parsing benchmarks by 50% with Mojo”Submitted Julia's latency: Past, present and future as a story · 4 points
HN discussionNote that union types are not the same thing as sum types, even if they're somewhat similar. https://viralinstruction.com/posts/uniontypes/
Comment linking /posts/uniontypes/
on “Swift is a more convenient Rust”Submitted How to optimize Julia code: A practical guide as a story · 4 points
HN discussionthis post on union types versus sum types is worth a read (the tl;dr is that they both have their uses and one is not strictly better) https://viralinstruction.com/posts/uniontypes/
Comment linking /posts/uniontypes/
on “TypeScript 6.0 RC”Submitted What scientists must know about hardware to write fast code as a story · 3 points
HN discussionI wonder how much these apply to the Julia compiler: based on the docs for `@simd` and the writing here [1], only the first two criteria on this page [2] seem to be really a requirement in Julia's case. The one about avoiding function calls is a no-go, since things like + and * are function calls too. But is it still required for all function calls to be inline-able? Indirect indexing isn't mentioned in Julia's case…
Comment linking /posts/hardware/
on “Vectorization: Introduction”Submitted Asynchronous Programming in Julia as a story · 3 points
HN discussionhttps://viralinstruction.com/ It's mostly about Julia programming, though I originally intended for it to also be about molecular biology. Posts tend to be relatively long.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Could you share your personal blog here?”Submitted Julia's latency: Past, present and future as a story · 3 points
HN discussion
