today's leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 31, 2024

• James G ☛ Exploring VisionScript language syntax: Part II

  This is part two of a recurring series on programming language design, starting with my experiences building VisionScript, an abstract programming language for computer vision. With VisionScript, you can classify images, detect objects in images, do those things on camera feeds, show text on a camera feed, read text in an image, and more. Read the first post for more context on this series.

• James G ☛ Exploring VisionScript language syntax

  Last year, I worked on a programming language called VisionScript. VisionScript is an abstract programming language for use in building computer vision applications. VisionScript is no longer in active development, but the spirit of the project -- abstracting computer vision into programmable blocks -- is still firmly with me.

• James G ☛ Conundra, indeed: Using curly braces in English

  This evening, I had a delightful discussion about programming language design. It was noted that some programming languages like C use curly braces. The curly braces have semantic meanings. In C, JavaScript, and other languages, curly braces denote a block of code. A block of code is a sequence of commands that are enclosed within a particular context. Consider the following code:

• James G ☛ Analysis of [the] prose use of braces (curly brackets)

  The convoluted and arguably superfluous nature of the title of this post is an apt reflection of my ambivalence associated with the use of braces in English prose. Earlier today, I blogged on the topic of braces {}, pondering the use -- and potential use -- of the braces. While used extensively in programming, the University of Lynchberg documented a potential use of braces in prose.

  Eager to understand this topic further, a fellow amateur grammarian and I spent an hour analyzing the use of braces in prose, consulting the Chicago Manual of Style (17th Edition, paperback), the Associated Press Stylebook (paperback), and internet sources including articles and discussions on curly braces across Wikipedia, Stack Overflow, and other websites.

• Trail of Bits ☛ Introducing Ruzzy, a coverage-guided Ruby fuzzer

  Trail of Bits is excited to introduce Ruzzy, a coverage-guided fuzzer for pure Ruby code and Ruby C extensions. Fuzzing helps find bugs in software that processes untrusted input.

• Mozilla

  • The Servo Blog: This month in Servo: tables, WOFF2, Outreachy, and more!

    This month, after surpassing our legacy layout engine in the CSS test suites, we’re proud to share that Servo has surpassed legacy in the whole suite of Web Platform Tests as well!

  • Rust

    • Rust Blog ☛ The Rust Programming Language Blog: Changes to `u128`/`i128` layout in 1.77 and 1.78

      Rust has long had an inconsistency with C regarding the alignment of 128-bit integers on the x86-32 and x86-64 architectures. This problem has recently been resolved, but the fix comes with some effects that are worth being aware of.

      As a user, you most likely do not need to worry about these changes unless you are:

      • Assuming the alignment of i128/u128 rather than using align_of
      • Ignoring the improper_ctypes* lints and using these types in FFI

      There are also no changes to architectures other than x86-32 and x86-64. If your code makes heavy use of 128-bit integers, you may notice runtime performance increases at a possible cost of additional memory use.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • Yusuf Bouzekri ☛ Linux text manipulation

    If you want to follow along, download the bash script, and experiment with the commands we’ll learn, but that’s not required per se.