Language Internals

Channels, Actors, and Goroutines: The Concurrency Models That Divided Language Design

In 1973, Carl Hewitt published a paper describing something he called the Actor model — isolated computational units that communicated exclusively by message passing, with no shared memory, no locks, …

The Many Ways to Fail: Error Handling Philosophies Across Programming Languages

Every program that has ever run has eventually encountered something unexpected. A file that wasn’t there. A network that dropped the connection. A number that divided by zero. A user who typed …

Who Taught Your Language to Remember? A Tour of Memory Management

In our three-part series on web backend performance, we measured idle memory ranging from 3 MB (Rust) to 500 MB (Spring Boot). We noted that a garbage collector explained much of Java’s …

The Billion-Dollar Mistake, 60 Years Later: How Languages Handle Null

In 2009, Tony Hoare stood at the QCon conference in London and confessed to a crime.

“I call it my billion-dollar mistake,” he said. “It was the invention of the null reference in …

def, func, fun, fn, sub: Why Every Language Has a Different Word for the Same Thing

Open almost any programming language reference and you will find, somewhere near the beginning, a section explaining how to define a reusable named block of code. The concept is universal. The word …

Strings Are Not Simple: How 12 Languages Model Text (And Why They Disagree)

Every programming language has strings. They’re so universal — so unremarkable — that we rarely stop to ask how they actually work. You type some characters between quotation marks, hand them to …