HN Explorer

Ask HN: Other examples of “standing-on-the-shoulders-of-giants” tools?

4 points by shdown ↗ HN
I know this is probably too broad of a topic, but there are some great tools out there that allow one to use solutions created by experts, to build something new without actually possessing expert knowledge in that topic.

Some examples are:

* LLVM: you can build a programming language that compiles to LLVM IR — and get all the optimizations for free.

* SAT solvers — convert your NP-hard problem to SAT and run a SAT solver on it.

* Boehm(-Demers-Weiser) garbage collector — collect garbage without actually explicitly writing any garbage collecting logic.

3 comments

[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 20.1 ms ] thread
BjoernKW
Plenty: SQL databases, spreadsheet software, CRUD application builders such as Ruby on Rails, pretty much every dependency management tool and the libraries those provide through public repositories ...
dragonwriter
Operating systems, VMs, programming language interpreters, compilers, and code libraries.

Oh, and the computers all that stuff and the the things you build by tying them together run on.

Just for starters.

sgillen
Honestly feel like most software we use fits this description. Programming languages, libraries, operating systems, drivers. Feels like you’d have a harder time naming software that doesn’t fit this description than that which does.