Mike Hearn

Graal & Truffle

An obscure research project could radically accelerate innovation in programming language design

Since the dawn of computing our industry has been engaged on a never ending quest to build the perfect language…

OK, what now?

The UK will soon start two years of negotiations with the EU on how to exit the union. They will probably stretch from October 2016 to October 2018.

This makes next year a critical one for the UK, so I wanted to research what might happen during it that could affect the exit…

How is the Remain campaign losing?

On Thursday the UK will hold a referendum on whether or not to leave the European Union. When the process started last year the Leave campaign had around 30% support. Polls that once said staying in was a sure bet are now divided, and many suggest that there’s a real…

Kotlin Native

A frequent question about Kotlin is if/when it will support compilation to native binaries that run without a JVM. Usually this takes the form of a more technical question like, “will the Kotlin compiler get an LLVM backend?”

Out or in?

On 23rd June the UK will hold a referendum on whether to stay in the EU or leave. Last year I was automatically assuming I’d be voting in…

Email is like a fine wine …

What Google should make instead of their OpenPGP extension

Recently I read ‘The Dream Of Usable Email Encryption Is Still A Work In Progress’, by VICE News. It starts like this:

What’s wrong with exceptions? Nothing.

Lately it’s become fashionable to release new programming languages into the industry that have poor or non-existent support for exceptions. Sometimes, as with Go or Rust, this is sold as a feature rather than a bug. The result is that I’ve started to see some…

A small followup

I got a lot of feedback on my last article, both positive and negative. Most of the negative feedback was in the form of conspiracy theories about me, rather than addressing the issues raised. That’s disappointing. Here are a couple that seemed more popular than the rest.

The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment

I’ve spent more than 5 years being a Bitcoin developer. The software I’ve written has been used by millions of users, hundreds of developers, and the talks I’ve given have led directly to the creation of several startups. I’ve talked about Bitcoin on Sky TV…

On block sizes

这是文章的中文翻译。

The Bitcoin block size issue is currently deadlocked, with nothing happening. Nor is anything going to happen: unlike what the community has been led to believe, the Bitcoin Core maintainers are not going to give the community a block size increase regardless of…