14 March, 2025 The Go programming language doesn’t have native support for sum types, but we’ll see how we can emulate them, how to decode and encode them into JSON, and how in some cases they can help avoid runtime panic exceptions. Whether we find them useful or not, sum types exist Sum types (aka

Kevin Roose’s latest essay in The New York Times is, like a lot of essays, dreamy, offering a vision of bold new reality, while underplaying the obstacles to that reality. His editors, and his audience, seem to love this sort of thing. To be candid, I don’t. A lot of it feels to me like

Many discoveries in physics flow from theory to experiment. Albert Einstein theorized that mass bends the fabric of space-time, and then Arthur Eddington observed the effects of this bending during a solar eclipse. Likewise, Peter Higgs first proposed the existence of the Higgs boson; nearly 50 years later, the particle was discovered at the Large

We often need to encode binary data into ASCII strings. The standards (e.g., email) to do so include base16, base32 and base64. There are some research papers on fast base64 encoding and decoding: Base64 encoding and decoding at almost the speed of a memory copy and Faster Base64 Encoding and Decoding using AVX2 Instructions. For