list of programming languages
A procedural macro receives a flat stream of tokens. It cannot ask “is this a struct or an enum?” or “what are the field names?” at the token level. The syn crate parses that token stream into a typed syntax tree—DeriveInput, ItemFn, Expr, Type—so the macro can navigate the structure with Rust’s pattern matching and…
Normalization is the process of organizing a database’s columns and tables to reduce redundancy and eliminate the anomalies that redundancy causes. The theory is older than most of the databases that use it, but the practice is as relevant as ever: a table that stores a customer’s address on every order will eventually have two…
The previous chapter covered the legacy experimental decorators — the version that required a compiler flag, relied on reflect-metadata, and powered frameworks like NestJS and TypeORM. This chapter covers the Stage 3 decorators, which TypeScript 5.0 shipped as the default. The new design is a near-rewrite of the legacy model: decorators receive a context object…
Dart’s server-side ecosystem has no single ORM that dominates the way Hibernate dominates Java or ActiveRecord dominates Ruby. Instead, the landscape is a spectrum: raw drivers that speak the wire protocol, query builders that generate dialect-correct SQL, and ORMs that map tables to typed Dart classes with code generation. The choice between them is a…
The previous chapter covered the four decisions that shape a production Node.js image. This chapter goes deeper into the two that have the largest measurable impact: the multi-stage build structure that determines what ships, and the non-root execution model that determines what happens when something goes wrong. The size difference is not marginal. A single-stage…
Serde is the serialization framework that the Rust ecosystem standardized on, and its design is shaped by a constraint that most serialization libraries do not share: Rust has no runtime reflection. Serde does not inspect a type at runtime to discover its fields; it generates the serialization code at compile time through a derive macro,…
The first three normal forms eliminate the anomalies that appear in most schemas. Beyond 3NF, three more forms exist: Boyce-Codd Normal Form, Fourth Normal Form, and Fifth Normal Form. Each addresses a narrower class of problem. BCNF handles tables with multiple candidate keys where a non-key column determines part of a key. 4NF handles multi-valued…
Angular is the framework that made decorators mainstream in the TypeScript ecosystem. The @Component, @Directive, @Injectable, and @NgModule decorators are the framework’s building blocks, and they were built on the legacy experimental decorators covered in TypeScript 77. But Angular has been migrating. The signal-based APIs introduced in Angular 16 — input(), output(), viewChild() — are…
The question of whether to write a native C extension or use Dart FFI is not a question about whether native code is faster than Dart. In a pure computational sense, C is faster for the same algorithm because it compiles to machine code without the Dart VM’s overhead. The real question is whether the…
A Node.js process that ignores SIGTERM is a process that Docker kills after ten seconds. An orchestrator sends the signal, waits for the configured grace period, and then sends SIGKILL—which cannot be caught, cannot be handled, and gives the application no opportunity to finish what it was doing. The difference between a clean shutdown and…