If you’re new to Emacs, you may wonder why you read and write text from buffers as opposed to, you know, files or documents. There’s the fact that it’s not skeuomorphic, and thus the term lacks the spark that connects it to a real-life concept. Most people have heard of files and documents in real life, and the term buffer is instead a capacious term with little grounding to most people.
Source: Why Emacs has Buffers, an article by Mickey Petersen.
Back in 2011, Rob Pike gave a talk on the topic of Lexical Scanning in Go, where he presented an interesting approach to lexical analysis with coroutines (implemented via goroutines communicating over a channel). Since I've been pondering the connection between coroutines and state machines in the past, Rob's talk inspired me to try approximating this approach in Python using sub-generators.
Source: Performance of coroutine-style lexers in Go, an article by Eli Bendersky.
GHC is built on a raft of primitive data types and operations; “primitive” in the sense that they cannot be defined in Haskell itself. While you really can use this stuff to write fast code, we generally find it a lot less painful, and more satisfying in the long run, to use higher-level language features and libraries. With any luck, the code you write will be optimised to the efficient unboxed version in any case. And if it isn’t, we’d like to know about it.