Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 09, 2023

• Parsing IP addresses crazily fast

  So the optimized function is six times faster than the standard one using GCC. Switching to clang (LLVM), you go seven times faster. The fact that LLVM has such an edge over GCC warrants further examination.

  I suspect that my code is not nearly optimal, but it is definitively worth it in some cases in its current state. I should stress that the optimized function includes full validation: we are not cheating.

• Update to Data Science Software Popularity

  I’ve updated The Popularity of Data Science Software‘s market share estimates based on scholarly articles. I posted it below, so you don’t have to sift through the main article to read the new section.

• Parallel curl tests

  In May 2001 we changed the file format for individual tests and this is still today the format we use. During the Twenty-two years that have passed we have added some 1600 test cases to the collection and we make sure that they can run on virtually any platform and that each test case themselves specify what curl features they require to work so that builds with those features disabled can skip those tests.

  Only a thorough test suite provides the necessary confidence you need to promise to users that we keep existing behaviors and yet we still can and do repeatedly rewrite, refactor and replace large chunks of the internals.

• The Right Way to Run Shell Commands From Python

  Python is a popular choice for automating anything and everything, that includes automating system administration tasks or tasks that require running other programs or interacting with operating system. There are however, many ways to achieve this in Python, most of which are arguably bad, though.

  So, in this article we will look at all the options you have in Python for running other processes - the bad; the good; and most importantly, the right way to do it.