Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 21, 2023,
updated Dec 21, 2023

• Benjamin Richner ☛ The day I started believing in Unit Tests

  Fast forward about a year. The test ran hundreds if not thousands of times successfully. What a waste of time... But then, one day, we started observing test failures. Not many, maybe three over the course of a few weeks. The test actually crashed with a Segmentation Fault, so it was clear that it was a severe error. Interestingly, none of the code under test had actually changed. Well, that's definitely something we had to investigate! I spare you the details of the search for the error, but eventually, I was able to reproduce the problem while a debugger was attached, so the entire context of the problem was handed to me on a silver platter.

• Sean Conner ☛ Timing code from inside an assembler

  Back in March, I wrote about some 6809 optimizations where I counted CPU cycles by hand. I came across that code the other day and thought to myself, my 6809 emulator counts cycles, and I've embedded it into my 6809 assembler—how hard could it be to time code in addition to testing it?

  Turns out—not terribly hard. I added an option to the .TRON directive to count cycles instead of printing code execution and have the .TROFF directive print the cycle count (indirectly, since the code isn't run until the end of the second pass of the assembler). Then I wrote up a few tests: [...]

• Jussi Pakkanen ☛ Even more breakage in the C++ module world

• DataGeeek ☛ Comparing many Models with Fast Regression

  Looking at the above chart, it seems reasonable to eliminate the prophet and lightgbm models from our workflow. We can then recalculate the accuracy of the remaining models and rank them accordingly.

• Rust

  • LWN ☛ Some recent and notable changes to Rust

    The Rust project makes incremental releases every six weeks, a fact that makes it easy to overlook some of the interesting changes coming to the language, such as new ABIs, better debugger support, asynchronous traits, and support for C strings. The end of the year provides an opportunity to look back over the past several months of updates, and to look forward to what to expect in 2024.

• R

  • Rlang ☛ 2023 rOpensci Champions Program: My Experience

    Being a part of the rOpenSci Champion’s program has been a transformative experience, pushing me to explore the world of R package development and contribute to the world of open science.

  • Rlang ☛ PowerQuery Puzzle solved with R

    I noticed that usually Power Query puzzles are about time.

  • Rlang ☛ In-Person Shiny in Production Conference Hosted by North East Data Science Group in Newcastle, UK

    The North East Data Scientists group hosts the annual Shiny in Production Conference.

• Perl / Raku

  • Perl ☛ Perl Advent Calendar 2023: Elves Versus Typos

    Strangely enough, one of the tools which the elves have in their toolkit is the typos utility. Now, this tool is not written in Perl, but rather in Rust. This bothers exactly nobody, since the elves use the right tool for the right job. The wonderful thing about typos is that this Rust-based tool can improve their Perl code. It's a Christmas miracle!

  • Rakulang ☛ Day 21 – Using DALL-E models in Raku

    We discuss workflows and related User eXperience (UX) challenges, then we demonstrate image-generation workflows.