Hacker News: mwsherman

New comment by mwsherman in "So, you want to chunk really fast?"

mwsherman — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 20:15:35 +0000

While this article is about perf — and trading off semantic precision by design — there is a Unicode standard for sentence boundaries, may be interesting: https://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/#Sentence_Boundaries

I implemented the sentence boundaries, but also thought that the notion of a “phrase” might be useful for such applications: https://github.com/clipperhouse/uax29/tree/master/phrases

New comment by mwsherman in "Go's escape analysis and why my function return worked"

mwsherman — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 15:22:12 +0000

Shameless plug, if one wishes to track down allocations in Go, an allocations explorer for VS Code: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Clipperh...

New comment by mwsherman in "A “frozen” dictionary for Python"

mwsherman — Thu, 11 Dec 2025 14:17:23 +0000

I’ve found C#’s frozen dictionary to be useful: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.collecti...

It’s optimized for fast reads in exchange for expensive creation.

New comment by mwsherman in "Go subtleties"

mwsherman — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 15:44:18 +0000

That’s true, converting in either direction will typically allocate. Which it must, semantically.

One can use unsafe for a zero-copy conversion, but now you are breaking the semantics: a string becomes mutable, because its underlying bytes are mutable.

Or! One can often handle strings and bytes interchangeably with generics: https://github.com/clipperhouse/stringish

New comment by mwsherman in "Go subtleties"

mwsherman — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 15:01:44 +0000

There is mention of how len() is bytes, not “characters”. A further subtlety: a rune (codepoint) is still not necessarily a “character” in terms of what is displayed for users — that would be a “grapheme”.

A grapheme can be multiple codepoints, with modifiers, joiners, etc.

This is true in all languages, it’s a Unicode thing, not a Go thing. Shameless plug, here is a grapheme tokenizer for Go: https://github.com/clipperhouse/uax29/tree/master/graphemes

New comment by mwsherman in "Go subtleties"

mwsherman — Wed, 22 Oct 2025 14:55:21 +0000

In Go, string effectively serves as a read-only slice, if we are talking about bytes.

ReadOnlySpan in C# is great! In my opinion, Go essentially designed in “span” from the start.

Making Unicode things fast in Go

mwsherman — Mon, 13 Oct 2025 13:52:07 +0000

Article URL: https://clipperhouse.com/go-unicode/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45568347

Points: 2

# Comments: 0

New comment by mwsherman in "Ask HN: What are you working on? (October 2025)"

mwsherman — Sun, 12 Oct 2025 23:28:31 +0000

A Go allocations explorer for VS Code. Extension: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=Clipperh...

Source: https://github.com/clipperhouse/go-allocations-vsix

New comment by mwsherman in "Show HN: I wrote a full text search engine in Go"

mwsherman — Thu, 09 Oct 2025 21:48:50 +0000

Shameless plug, you may wish to do Lucene-style tokenizing using the Unicode standard: https://github.com/clipperhouse/uax29/tree/master/words

New comment by mwsherman in "Safe zero-copy operations in C#"

mwsherman — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 14:36:57 +0000

I move between Go and C#. I wrote a zero-allocation package in Go [1] and then ported to C# — and the allocations exploded!

I had forgotten, or perhaps never realized, that substrings in C# allocate. The solution was Spans.

Notably, it caused me to realize that Go had “spans” designed in from the start.

[1] https://github.com/clipperhouse/uax29

Show HN: Go Allocations Explorer for VS Code

mwsherman — Fri, 26 Sep 2025 15:24:17 +0000

I’ve learned that my intuitions about where an allocation is coming from aren’t always correct. One tracks it down by creating a -memprofile then go tool pprof, and then some searching. It’s all fine, but tedious.

So, I’ve put that process into a VS Code sidebar, where one simply clicks a benchmark and gets a list of allocations, with a link to the source line.

Hope you’ll try it and give feedback. Marketplace link is above, you can also search for it in your Extensions sidebar, and the source is here: https://github.com/clipperhouse/go-allocations-vsix

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45387577

Points: 4

# Comments: 0