Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 25, 2023

• Rlang ☛ reactable.extras 0.2.0 Release: Enhanced Interactivity and Efficiency for Shiny Apps

  We are thrilled to announce the release of reactable.extras, which is now available for seamless integration into your Shiny applications, marking its debut as a significant release on CRAN.

• Andy Wingo: tree-shaking, the horticulturally misguided algorithm

  Let's talk about tree-shaking!

  But first, I need to talk about WebAssembly's dirty secret: despite the hype, WebAssembly has had limited success on the web.

  There is Photoshop, which does appear to be a real success. 5 years ago there was Figma, though they don't talk much about Wasm these days. There are quite a number of little NPM libraries that use Wasm under the hood, usually compiled from C++ or Rust. I think Blazor probably gets used for a few in-house corporate apps, though I could be fooled by their marketing.

  But then you might recall the hyped demos of 3D first-person-shooter games with Unreal engine, but that was 5 years and one major release of Unreal ago: the current Unreal 5 does not support targetting WebAssembly.

  Don't get me wrong, I think WebAssembly is great. It is having fine success in off-the-web environments, and I think it is going to be a key and growing part of the Web platform. I suspect, though, that we are only just now getting past the trough of dissolutionment.

  It's worth reflecting a bit on the nature of web Wasm's successes and failures. Taking Photoshop as an example, I think we can say that Wasm does very well at bringing large C++ programs to the web. I know that it took quite some work, but I understand the end result to be essentially the same source code, just compiled for a different target.

• KDAB ☛ CXX-Qt 0.6 Release

  We just released CXX-Qt version 0.6!

  CXX-Qt is a set of Rust crates for creating bidirectional Rust ⇄ C++ bindings with Qt. It can be used to integrate Rust into C++ applications using CMake or build Rust applications with Cargo. CXX-Qt provides tools for implementing QObject subclasses in Rust that can be used from C++, QML, and JavaScript.

  For 0.6, we’re excited to announce that we’re on the road to stabilization! 🥳 We’ve done a (hopefully final) iteration of our API and are now happier than ever to release it.

  The new API is now truly in the spirit of CXX.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Tedium ☛ Weird HTML Hacks

    Many of these code quirks shouldn’t work, but somehow they do. We’re highlighting 10 hacky website coding strategies—some big, some small.

• Python

  • Didier Stevens ☛ Update: 1768.py Version 0.0.20

    This update to 1768.py, my Cobalt Strike beacon analysis tool, adds “runtime configuration” extraction. Although 1768.py could already search for beacon configurations inside process memory dumps, the dump was just processed as a raw file. With this update, 1768.py will also search for the runtime configuration inside a process memory dump.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • University of Toronto ☛ Unix's 'test' program and the V7 Bourne shell

    Recently I read Julio Merino's test, [, and [[ (via), which is in part about there being a real '[' binary and a 'test' binary to go along with it, and as part of that, Merino wonders why the name 'test' exists at all. I don't have any specific insight into this, but I can talk a bit about the history, which turns out to be more tangled and peculiar than I thought.