Hacker News now runs on top of Common Lisp

Hacker News was written in the Arc lisp dialect, a dialect created by Paul Graham. Arc was implemented on top of Racket, but that has now changed. HN runs on top of SBCL since a few months. But why? For performance reasons. I recently noticed that Hacker News no longer uses paging for long threads. In the past, when a discussion grew large, we had to click “More” to load the next page of comments, and dang would occasionally post helpful tips to remind us about this feature. Was there an announcement regarding this change? Has anyone else still seen paging recently? I’d love to know more details—especially the technical aspects or considerations that went into the decision. Answer: It’s because Clarc is finally out. dang, Sept. 2024 [Clarc] is much faster and also will easily let HN run on multiple cores. It’s been in the works for years, mainly because I rarely find time to work on it, but it’s all pretty close to done. dang, 2022 How it’s done: there’s now an Arc-to-JS calle ... Read full article.