Submission timeline
2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
First comments on top threads
HN comment orderSo every once in a while I come across old timey C optimizations in the spirit of Duff's device or bit twiddling to swap variables, 'etc 'etc... While they have a certain kind of charm to them they seem to be almost universally bested by increasingly mature compilers and complex (or virtualized) hardware. So I'm kind of coming to the conclusion that clever pointer arithmetic games and even manual malloc/free are increasingly futile unless you're targeting embedded devices. If a…
The "Garbage Collection" chapter in the OP's recent book Crafting Interpreters goes into this in a bunch more detail (in the context of a language VM): https://craftinginterpreters.com/garbage-collection.html -- so well written, both this and the 2013 blog post.
This is awesome. I'm working my way through The Garbage Collection Handbook and it's always nice to see a GC link on HN. "What does “low on memory” even mean, especially on modern computers with near-infinite virtual memory?" is a question that I've been wondering about for a while.
Shameless plug: I ported the code to Rust: https://github.com/baguette/rs-babygc (feedback is welcome).
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 3
- Total points
- 545
- Total comments
- 161
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2013-12-08 | Baby's First Garbage CollectorFirst breakout · Best thread | daw___ | 217 | 84 |
| 2015-12-26 | Baby's First Garbage Collector (2013) | rspivak | 48 | 17 |
| 2018-01-21 | Simple Garbage Collector – Implementation | bootcat | 2 | 0 |
| 2018-09-03 | Baby's First Garbage Collector – Journal.stuffwithstuff.com | federicoponzi | 1 | 0 |
| 2019-03-12 | Baby's First Garbage Collector (2013) | lrsjng | 1 | 0 |
| 2019-08-09 | Baby's First Garbage Collector | pcr910303 | 1 | 0 |
| 2019-11-06 | Baby’s First Garbage Collector (2013) | pcr910303 | 125 | 29 |
| 2021-05-13 | Baby's First Garbage Collector | luismedel | 1 | 0 |
| 2022-03-02 | Baby’s First Garbage Collector (2013) | grep_it | 2 | 0 |
| 2022-08-10 | Baby’s First Garbage Collector (2013)Latest 20+ point return | bshanks | 146 | 30 |
| 2025-01-09 | Baby's First Garbage Collector (2013) | hhthrowaway1230 | 1 | 1 |