Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Bob Nystrom

@stuffwithstuff.com

2.6K followers 130 following 37 posts

Dad, husband, brother, son. Working on Dart at Google, ex-game dev at EA, wrote "Game Programming Patterns" and "Crafting Interpreters". http://stuffwithstuff.com/

stuffwithstuff.com

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 5d

The unicorn emoji 🦄 is 1 code point (0x0001f984), 2 code units in UTF-16 (0xd83e, 0xdd84), and 4 bytes in UTF-16 (0xd8, 0x3e, 0xdd, 0x84). The answer is different for encodings like UTF-8 or UTF-32 (JSON is UTF-16). And there is a whole separate ball of complexity around grapheme clusters.

1 2

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 19d

Is "length" here bytes, code points, or code units? :) I hate that I can't read anything about string length without that question immediately entering my mind.

2 3

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · 23d

Hashtag life goals.

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · Sep 5

Emoji Kitchen is the best thing Google has ever made.

1 1 11

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · Jul 18

Have you considered using AI to detect AI posts? Then you could write a post about using AI to detect AI posts and post it.

1 2

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · Jul 18

Oh, yes! I just, uh, keep forgetting about it. :)

1 1

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · Jul 17

Really wish Hacker News would fork into "LLM news" and "all the other Hacker News". It's worse now than it was with crypto during the crypto bubble.

Yes, gen-AI is important and I want to learn about it, but there are diminishing returns in yet another dude's breathless vibe coding blog post.

6 55

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · Jul 16

Trivia: This use of the word "orthogonal" is older than us too. As far as I know, it's earliest use is in the ALGOL 68 report.

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · Jul 16

I must admit to being a political novice, but wasn't the RNC slightly more instrumental in Trump being elected?

1 2

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · Jul 16

There are a bunch of reports in the issue trackers for both books already, but I'm trying to not touch them at all. (It's easy to fix the online versions, but then I worry about the online versions getting out of sync with the print versions and not realizing that if I update the print editions.)

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · Jul 2

Yeah, having written a parser for it... Markdown is just not a great language. CommonMark helps regularize it some, but in the early days, it was wild.

I don't have advice that would fit in a bsky post beyond the general "avoid inventing a language unless you have to (or want to)". :)

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · Jul 2

I need to know more about the Tears for Fears Trout sticker.

1 3

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · Jun 15

The premise of LLMs leading to AGI is that if just you wordcel hard enough, a shape rotator magically pops out.

1 5 51

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · Jun 12

I still don't really understand this one. 🙃

1 2

Reposted by Bob Nystrom

Dart @dart.dev · Jun 10

Introducing Dart 3.8! Here's everything you need to know ↓

1 6 37

Reposted by Bob Nystrom

Allison F @ablington.bsky.social · Mar 30

yes

160 8.6K 33K

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · Jun 3

It's good to be writing again!

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · May 31

I use a stitch counter app on my phone, or a polyhedral die to keep track of counts.

1 1

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · May 31

I wrote a blog post about, of all things, knitting: journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2025/05/30/c...

Consider Knitting – journal.stuffwithstuff.com

journal.stuffwithstuff.com

2 1 26

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · May 31

@mrale.ph would definitely know better than me. Compiler folks who work on optimizations are by nature cagey about definitive answers to questions like this because they want their future selves to have the freedom to change optimizations without breaking users who rely on them.

1 1

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · May 26

Wrote a blog post on noodling around with syntax for access control modifiers in my hobby scripting language: journal.stuffwithstuff.com/2025/05/26/a...

Access Control Syntax – journal.stuffwithstuff.com

journal.stuffwithstuff.com

4 2 39

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · May 15

Sure! Thank you for asking. :)

1 2

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · May 15

"It is a rare privilege to be able to spend ten years building a tool you want to use, and then be able to spend your time at work using it."

So true. One of the things that makes me excited to work every day and grateful that my career led where it did.

1 18

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · Apr 30

Yeah, it was a deliberate choice to not use those (even though I personally love those features). The goal is to make the code as readable to as many people as possible, so I tried to stick within a fairly small subset of imperative/OOP code.

Bob Nystrom @stuffwithstuff.com · Apr 11

I write how I talk. :)