Hacker News: healeycodes

Decompiling Fast Food Tycoon 2: Drawing the World

healeycodes — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 18:17:57 +0000

Article URL: https://healeycodes.com/decompiling-fast-food-tycoon-2-drawing-the-world

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50223739

Points: 207

# Comments: 42

What Makes LLM Tokenization Slow?

healeycodes — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 09:24:42 +0000

Article URL: https://healeycodes.com/what-makes-llm-tokenization-slow

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49533844

Points: 1

# Comments: 0

New comment by healeycodes in "Adding Go's Defer to the TypeScript Compiler"

healeycodes — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 05:35:33 +0000

Cool! I kinda feel like these should be built-in. But this looks useful for closing the DX gap here.

New comment by healeycodes in "Adding Go's Defer to the TypeScript Compiler"

healeycodes — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 05:31:23 +0000

Reasonably? Yes. Could probably be made to work well.

  $ bat 2.ts
  ───────────────
     1 │ function one() {
     2 │   let x = 1;
     3 │   defer (() => { throw new Error("thrown from one!"); })()
     4 │   x = 2;
     5 │ }
     6 │ one();
  ─────┴─────────

  $ node 2.js
  ~/healeycodes-typescript-go/2.js:29
            throw _errors_1[0];
            ^

  Error: thrown from one!
      at _callee_1 (/Users/andrew/Documents/GitHub/healeycodes-typescript-go/2.js:9:46)
      at /Users/andrew/Documents/GitHub/healeycodes-typescript-go/2.js:10:33
      at one (/Users/andrew/Documents/GitHub/healeycodes-typescript-go/2.js:22:31)
      at Object. (/Users/andrew/Documents/GitHub/healeycodes-typescript-go/2.js:34:1)
      at Module._compile (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:1830:14)
      at Object..js (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:1961:10)
      at Module.load (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:1553:32)
      at Module._load (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:1355:12)
      at wrapModuleLoad (node:internal/modules/cjs/loader:255:19)
      at Module.executeUserEntryPoint [as runMain (node:internal/modules/run_main:154:5)

  Node.js v24.15.0

New comment by healeycodes in "Adding Go's Defer to the TypeScript Compiler"

healeycodes — Mon, 03 Aug 2026 05:21:00 +0000

Author here. I find try/finally verbose and vulnerable to mistakes. For me, it adds "function noise".

Adding Go's Defer to the TypeScript Compiler

healeycodes — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 20:12:39 +0000

Article URL: https://healeycodes.com/adding-defer-to-the-typescript-compiler

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49147853

Points: 21

# Comments: 29

New comment by healeycodes in "A Tiny Compiler for Data-Parallel Kernels"

healeycodes — Sat, 27 Jun 2026 05:04:44 +0000

You're right that my post's algo does not handle this case (it's more of a toy to explain the basic cases).

> When I read Allan and Kennedy my impression was that vectorising arbitrary imperative code is a much harder problem than designing a language that only allows for vectorisable constructs to be expressed in the first place.

Yeah, I buy this.

> In my example that would produce different code, requiring a multiplication:

  lambda i: table[(phase0 + i*inc) % TABLE_LEN]

I think some compilers may lower this without the multiplication.. (e.g. turning it back into an induction variable) but with floats they may not be allowed to, since repeated addition and "phase0 + i*inc" are not strictly equal.

A Tiny Compiler for Data-Parallel Kernels

healeycodes — Thu, 25 Jun 2026 13:32:12 +0000

Article URL: https://healeycodes.com/a-tiny-compiler-for-data-parallel-kernels

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48673115

Points: 52

# Comments: 5

New comment by healeycodes in "Building a Shell"

healeycodes — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 13:08:15 +0000

Editing the current line works because I brought in https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/readline.3.html towards the end so I could support editing, tab completion, and history.

IIRC readline uses a `char *` internally since the length of a user-edited line is fairly bounded.

New comment by healeycodes in "Building a Shell"

healeycodes — Tue, 17 Mar 2026 11:31:42 +0000

Author here, and yeah, I agree. I skipped writing a parser altogether and just split on whitespace and `|` so that I could get to the interesting bits.

For side-projects, I have to ask myself if I'm writing a parser, or if I'm building something else; e.g. for a toy programming language, it's way more fun to start with an AST and play around, and come back to the parser if you really fall in love with it.