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Wilfred Hughes::Blog
Personal blog · wilfred.me.ukprogramming
Wilfred Hughes::Blog is a personal blog at wilfred.me.uk about programming. Since 2013, 42 different Hacker News readers have linked it 74 times, most often “The Fastest BigInt In The West (2014)”. The last post was in 2022, but the archive is still widely read.
programming, language design, and human factors
Most-linked posts?
- The Fastest BigInt In The West (2014)3 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2022-09-17
- Example-Driven Development3 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2016-07-30
- Difftastic, the fantastic diff3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-09-07
- Remacs is an incremental port of Emacs' C code to Rust3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2017-05-23
- My First LLVM Compiler (2015)3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2015-02-22
- The Fastest BigInt in the West3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-10-20
- Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2013-04-26
- The Definitive Guide to Syntax Highlighting2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-09-28
- Searching a Million Lines of Lisp2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2016-10-05
- The Siren Song of Little Languages2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-03-28
What Hacker News says?
There was a good point made, that has stuck with me over the years. that our syntax highlighters are highlighting the wrong thing. They should not be coloring the grammar, we are good at picking out grammar, they should be highlighting the symbols. each different variable and function name should be getting it's own color. that is, the goal is to make it quicker to distinguish different symbols, not that they are a…
Comment linking /blog/2014/09/27/the-definitive-guide-to-syntax-highlighting/
on “Delta: A syntax-highlighting pager for Git, diff, grep, and blame output”Submitted Difftastic, the fantastic diff as a story · 698 points
HN discussionhttps://www.wilfred.me.uk/blog/2014/10/20/the-fastest-bigint... Look at all the programming language implementations that provide big integers by calling out to GMP. Why would it be "cheating" when available to all and done openly? Libraries matter.
Comment linking /blog/2014/10/20/the-fastest-bigint-in-the-west/
on “A comparison of Rust’s borrow checker to the one in C#”Submitted Announcing Remacs: Porting Emacs to Rust as a story · 206 points
HN discussionhttps://www.wilfred.me.uk/blog/2014/10/20/the-fastest-bigint... Look at all the programming language implementations that provide big integers by calling out to GMP. Why would it be "cheating" when available to all and done openly? Libraries matter. >Most the Debian benchmarks for C# are cheaty too.< Just name-calling.
Comment linking /blog/2014/10/20/the-fastest-bigint-in-the-west/
on “A comparison of Rust’s borrow checker to the one in C#”Submitted Example-Driven Development as a story · 157 points
HN discussion> This looks like a lot of work for what amounts to very little end-user benefit. Oh, but how wrong you are. At London Emacs meetup Wilfred gave a talk about his motivations for this work. One of the big and most obvious benefits is this: while porting some feature to Rust, he discovered a bug in Emacs, fixed it and got given commit access for his work. You can read the transcript of his presentation here: http://ww…
Comment linking /blog/2017/04/30/remacs-talk-transcript/
on “Remacs – A community-driven port of Emacs to Rust”Submitted Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language as a story · 139 points
HN discussionAccording to http://www.wilfred.me.uk/blog/2017/07/15/these-weeks-in-rema... it's running on 32-bit macOS. I don't know if Remacs is 32-bit-only on all platforms. This is an interesting project and I wish them well. I have no opinion on Rust at the moment, but I do see this as part of a general trend towards safer languages.
Comment linking /blog/2017/07/15/these-weeks-in-remacs-ii/
on “Remacs – A community-driven port of Emacs to Rust”Submitted Why Markdown Is Not My Favourite Language (2012) as a story · 114 points
HN discussionSTOP/ I just think that before judging remacs everyone had to read this blogpost: http://www.wilfred.me.uk/blog/2017/04/30/remacs-talk-transcr...
Comment linking /blog/2017/04/30/remacs-talk-transcript/
on “Remacs – A community-driven port of Emacs to Rust”Submitted My First LLVM Compiler (2015) as a story · 87 points
HN discussionOr this one: http://www.wilfred.me.uk/blog/2017/01/11/announcing-remacs-p... For extra enjoyment, look at the way they convert a function definition to Rust. You'd hope that the new version would be at least somewhat nicer than the original, but of course not. As lng as it's Rust it must be better, right?
Comment linking /blog/2017/01/11/announcing-remacs-porting-emacs-to-rust/
on “GIMP developer looking for funding”Submitted The Definitive Guide to Syntax Highlighting as a story · 77 points
HN discussionI really love the idea and style of this blog post and the project's README. I recognized the style from somewhere and then realized it was the same author as "Example Driven Development"[1], another one that showed up on HN a while back. [1]: http://www.wilfred.me.uk/blog/2016/07/30/example-driven-deve...
Comment linking /blog/2016/07/30/example-driven-development/
on “Announcing Remacs: Porting Emacs to Rust”Submitted Synthesising Elisp Code as a story · 76 points
HN discussionI don’t think I’ve seen BigInt in the wild Wild West of JS at all, so that’s probably true that most folks are not aware of it. I wonder if there’s some room for improvement since using GMP is pretty standard for most languages. Edit: forgot to link to a BigInt comparison in major language implementations http://www.wilfred.me.uk/blog/2014/10/20/the-fastest-bigint-...
Comment linking /blog/2014/10/20/the-fastest-bigint-in-the-west/
on “Emacs-ng: Emacs with Deno runtime and TypeScript”Submitted Searching a Million Lines of Lisp as a story · 73 points
HN discussionI assumed the readers would follow the link to see the original results. GMP is undoubtedly the state-of-the-art of arbitrary-precision arithmetic. The point of this table was to compare bignum implementations provided by different languages, so programs that use GMP bindings are excluded. Probably it would make sense to include the best result that uses GMP, but I think GHC is quite representative of GMP's performa…
Comment linking /blog/2014/10/20/the-fastest-bigint-in-the-west/
on “Python behind the scenes #8: how Python integers work”Submitted Essential Elisp libraries as a story · 67 points
HN discussionhttps://github.com/Wilfred/difftastic/wiki/Structural-Diffs is a nice list of alternatives. Difftastic itself is great as well! The author wrote up nice posts about its design: https://www.wilfred.me.uk/blog/2022/09/06/difftastic-the-fan... , https://difftastic.wilfred.me.uk/diffing.html .
Comment linking /blog/2022/09/06/difftastic-the-fantastic-diff/
on “Diffsitter – A Tree-sitter based AST difftool to get meaningful semantic diffs”Submitted The Siren Song of Little Languages as a story · 57 points
HN discussionFascinating, but not surprising that the study concludes that the "effect becomes weaker with an increase in programming experience". Maybe of interest is Hughes' discussion [1] of the different forms of syntax colouring. It was discussed on HN before [2]. [1] http://www.wilfred.me.uk/blog/2014/09/27/the-definitive-guid... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8378799
Comment linking /blog/2014/09/27/the-definitive-guide-to-syntax-highlighting
on “The impact of syntax colouring on program comprehension [pdf]”Submitted Even More Brainfuck Optimisations as a story · 56 points
HN discussionWilfred is a genius. The OP article is from about a year ago, but it laid the foundation for the Emacs package he just released: http://www.wilfred.me.uk/blog/2017/08/30/helpful-adding-cont...
Comment linking /blog/2017/08/30/helpful-adding-contextual-help-to-emacs/
on “Searching a Million Lines of Lisp”Submitted The Siren Song of Little Languages as a story · 50 points
HN discussionAt least with BigInts, CPython implementation is quite fast. See https://www.wilfred.me.uk/blog/2014/10/20/the-fastest-bigint...
Comment linking /blog/2014/10/20/the-fastest-bigint-in-the-west/
on “Why Is Python So Popular in 2025?”Submitted Comparative Macrology as a story · 44 points
HN discussionHappy to read there is some interest in “Markdown 2.0” or “lightweight markup, next generation”. With adoption by big outlets like Github and StackOverflow, and dozens of static site generators built on plain text source files, marked-up in Markdown syntax, Markdown is becoming a _de facto_ general-purpose document _editing_ and _storage_ standard. With the advent of fast client-side parsers, soon it might even subs…
Comment linking /blog/2012/07/30/why-markdown-is-not-my-favourite-language/
on “SkrivML: A lightweight markup language”Submitted Editing Julia code with Emacs as a story · 38 points
HN discussion
