Programming Leftovers and Education Tidbits

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 17, 2024

• Phil Eaton ☛ Zig, Rust, and other languages

  Having worked a bit in Zig, Rust, Go and now C, I think there are a few common topics worth having a fresh conversation on: automatic memory management, the standard library, and explicit allocation.

  Zig is not a mature language. But it has made enough useful choices for a number of companies to invest in it and run it in production. The useful choices make Zig worth talking about.

• Nil Coalescing LtĐuzal ☛ Pattern matching for custom types in Swift

  Pattern matching in Swift is a technique that allows us to check and de-structure data in a concise way. It's most often seen in switch statements, where it can match against a variety of patterns.

• Thorsten Ball ☛ A Few Words on Testing

  First, my credentials. More than half of all the code I wrote in my life is test code. My name is attached to hundreds of pages of TDD. In my first internship as a software developer I wrote tests and did TDD while pair programming in my first week. I’ve written unit tests, integration tests, tests for exploration, tests to stop problems from reappearing, tests to leave a message, tests using testing frameworks and BDD and no framework at all, tests in Ruby, JavaScript, C, Go, Rust, Scheme, Bash. After two drinks, I’m willing to say that I know more about testing than many others. Right now — no drinks — I’m willing to say that I love testing and that writing tests has brought me a lot of joy.

  Yet I can no longer say that I’m free of doubt. To stick with the theme: I’m much more sober about testing today than I was ten years ago. Recently, in the past few months, the doubts have grown.

• Hackaday ☛ A Nine-Year-Old’s Z80 Drawing Program

  Full disclosure: [Óscar] isn’t nine now, but he was in 1988 when he wrote LOCS, a drawing program in Z80 assembly modeled after Logo. You can see a demo of the system in the video below. You might wonder why you’d want to study a three-decade-old program written for a CPU by a nine-year-old almost five decades ago. Well, honestly, we aren’t sure either. But it did get us thinking.

• Education

  • FreeBSD ☛ The FreeBSD Project Participating in Google Summer of Code 2024

    This year marks the 20th year of GSoC, and also marks the 20th year that the FreeBSD Project will be participating as a mentoring organization. Past GSoC projects have led to critical infrastructure work found in FreeBSD 13.x. Hierarchical Resource Limits and Instruction Level Dynamic Tracing started as GSoC projects, but the code can be found in FreeBSD to this day. Last year, the Foundation interviewed the mentees participating in GSoC 2023:

  • Stephen Smith ☛ Which Assembly Language Book is Right for You

    I’ve now written four books on Assembly Language programming, three for ARM processors and now one for RISC-V processors. This article explains why there are three books for ARM CPUs and then where people will find RISC-V CPUs.

  • Perl ☛ The Perl and Raku Conference 2024 June 24-28, Las Vegas, NV

    The Perl and Raku Conference or TPRC (Formerly known as YAPC::NA) is a high-quality, inexpensive technical conference with its roots in the Perl Mongers user groups. The conference celebrates the Perl and Raku programming languages. It is meant to be accessible to anyone, regardless of experience, yet valuable to even the most skilled programmers. Each year, the conference attracts hundreds of programmers from around the world.