Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 15, 2022

• What’s So Great About Functional Programming Anyway?

  Still, one has to wonder. There must be a reason these zealots are so excited. In my personal experience, it’s wasn’t the lazy, incompetent programmers who developed an interest functional programming.1 Instead, the most intelligent coders I knew tended to take it up; the people most passionate about writing good code. (Though, they did tend towards the boffin end of the spectrum.) And this raises the question: What are they so excited about?

• Codeberg is moving ... and what this means to you

  TL;DR: Codeberg might suffer from decreased performance, and smaller downtimes from Monday (Nov 14) to Wednesday (Nov 16). Final migration will require a short period of planned downtime on Wednesday.

• Status update, November 2022 · emersion

  Last Friday we’ve shipped wlroots 0.16! This long-overdue release is the fruit of 10 months worth of work from 46 contributors. It includes many improvements, especially around new protocol support, the scene-graph API and the Vulkan renderer. See the release notes for more details!

  With the new release freshly delivered, we’re already working on the next one. I’ve been continuing my work on the Vulkan renderer: the patch to stop blocking while the GPU is rendering is almost ready to be merged. I’ve even fixed a Vulkan-ValidationLayers bug along the way. I’ve also investigated color management and ICC profiles a bit more, and have a better idea of what we need to lay down the first pieces of the puzzle.

  I’ve reached a new milestone for wlroots-rs: the example can now display a red screen! I’ve cleaned up my work and properly exposed the API in a package. I’m still not super happy about the way the compositor state is handled, if you have suggestions please let me know!

  I’ve released libdrm 2.4.114 with new helpers to allocate DRM dumb buffers. Up until now this is something developers had to hand-roll themselves with raw IOCTLs, hopefully this addition can help newcomers and improve type safety. I’ve also released Pixman 0.42.0 with a constified API for regions and work by Manuel Stoeckl to fix bugs discovered via the wlroots Pixman renderer and port demos to GTK3.

• StarFive Releases StarFive StarStudio IDE, which supports both Linux and Baremetal Development

  Late last year, StarFive Technology released “StarFive Dubhe Linux Software Development Kit (SDK)”, which is based on the Yocto Project. It provides a flexible toolset and development environment that supports global collaborations among embedded device developers, allowing them to share technologies, software stacks, configurations, and best practices used to create tailored Linux images. To ensure the best out-of-box customer experience, a Yocto-extensible SDK (eSDK) is also included. The eSDK eliminates the need to download large packages of Yocto. As such, customers will be able to recompile the entire system in a much shorter timeframe with just a few simple steps.

• Installing Helix Editor Language Servers

  Helix Editor using the Bash Language Server to show the symbols in the script included in this post.

• Pretty Petite Picolibc Powers Processors

  Many times when someone tells you that language X is “better” at something they really mean that it has better built-in libraries for that task. Java is a great example. The language isn’t all that different from C++ outside of garbage collection and multiple inheritance, but the standard libraries are super powerful, especially for networking.� Even C relies on a library to provide a lot of functions people think of as part of the language — printf, for example. That’s not really part of the C language, but just part of the standard library. When you are writing for a tiny processor, the choice of library is critical and [Keith Packard] offers you one choice: picolibc.

• Qt 6.4.1 Released

  I am proud to announce that we have released Qt 6.4.1 today.

• GCC 13.0.0 Status Report (2022-11-14), Stage 3 in effect now

  The GCC development branch which will become GCC 13 is now in
  bugfixing mode (Stage 3) until the end of Jan 15th.
  
  
  As usual the first weeks of Stage 3 are used to feature patches
  posted late during Stage 1.  At some point unreviewed features
  need to be postponed for the next Stage 1.
  

• How to Install Python in RHEL and Debian Systems [Ed: New update]

  Several top universities around the globe use Python to introduce students to programming. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of Texas at Arlington, and Stanford are only a few examples of institutions that use this language extensively.