Hacker News now runs on top of Common Lisp

a year ago

Hacker News was originally written in the Arc lisp dialect, created by Paul Graham.
Arc was initially implemented on Racket but has since transitioned to SBCL for performance reasons.
Recent changes include the removal of paging for long threads, a feature previously managed by 'More' clicks.
The transition is due to the release of Clarc, a faster Arc implementation enabling multi-core support.
Development involved creating Arc-to-JS (Lilt) and Arc-to-Common Lisp (Clarc) compilers, structured in stages (arc0, arc1, arc2).
Clarc's code hasn't been released due to anti-abuse measures embedded in the HN codebase.
The transition was successful, described as 'splash-free'.

Hasty Briefsbeta