Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 28, 2024,
updated Jan 28, 2024

• Hackaday ☛ A ZX Spectrum Raytracer, In BASIC

  [Gabriel Gambetta] knows a few things about ray tracers, being the author of Tiny Raytracer, a raytracer written in just 912 bytes of JavaScript. As a long-time fellow sufferer of the UK-designed ZX Spectrum, could these two love affairs be merged? Could the Tiny Raytracer fit on the ZX Spectrum? In BASIC? The answer is an affirmative, albeit with our beloved speccy’s many limitations.

• Steinar H Gunderson ☛ Steinar H. Gunderson: Life with bcachefs

  After bcachefs suddenly got merged into mainline in 6.7 (after years and years of development and arguing on LKML), I've been curious; could this be an interesting thing to test out? I gave up btrfs many years ago as just way too slow, and to be honest I've been quite fine with ext4/xfs + LVM + md, but there was something in it that spoke to me nevertheless.

  So the last month or so, I've been having /home on my primary machine (server) as bcachefs, with a small 10GB SSD backing. Surprisingly… it's been quite OK? It doesn't really speak all that well with LVM (since it's very much intended as a replacement, you can't do stuff like let one SSD volume back two different HDD volumes), and its erasure coding parts are not ready yet (so I'll still need MD underneath for the RAID-6), but it's been stable. It hasn't eaten any of my files, it hasn't crashed, it hasn't had weird performance hiccups. For something that's still so new in mainline, that's actually pretty good.

• Python

  • Bastian Venthur: Investigating popularity of Python build backends over time

    Inspired by a Mastodon post by Françoise Conil, who investigated the current popularity of build backends used in pyproject.toml files, I wanted to investigate how the popularity of build backends used in pyproject.toml files evolved over the years since the introduction of PEP-0517 in 2015.

• R

  • Rlang ☛ Extract raster values to points with bilinear interpolation

    A student recently asked me how exactly the R terra::extract() function worked when using method="bilinear" to get raster values for points.

  • Rlang ☛ Unveiling the Earliest Date: A Journey Through R

    Greetings, fellow data enthusiasts! Today, we embark on a quest to uncover the earliest date lurking within a column of dates using the power of R.

  • Rlang ☛ Confirmation dialog in a Shiny app

    Assume you have a Shiny app allowing to upload a data file and to perform various operations on the uploaded data.

• Rust

  • The Servo Blog: Two months in Servo: better inline layout, stable Rust, and more!

    Servo has had some exciting changes land in our nightly builds over the last month: [...]

  • Linux Links ☛ Yazi – terminal file manager

    Yazi is billed as a blazingly fast TUI file manager with asynchronous support. It's written in Rust.

  Mozilla

  • Firefox Developer Experience: Firefox DevTools Newsletter — 122

    Developer Tools help developers write and debug websites on Firefox. This newsletter gives an overview of the work we’ve done as part of the Firefox 122 Nightly release cycle.