Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 27, 2024

• Alex Ewerlöf ☛ Percentile

  In simple terms, we can think of a metric as an array of values with a timestamp and some optional tags.

• Sandor Dargo ☛ Member ordering and binary sizes

  While I have been preparing my presentation for C++ On Sea, I realized that something is missing from How to keep your binaries small. The importance of member ordering!

  I remember learning at a performance tuning workshop that the order of member variables can significantly impact the memory layout and size of objects. Considering this factor, you can make your class more cache-friendly to increase runtime performance. This matters mostly when you plan to store a class in big numbers in a container.

  But what about binary sizes?

  Before that, let’s first discuss what padding means.

• Python

  • Felipe Borges: Rethinking Planet GNOME with GitLab Pages/CI

    Some GNOME websites are getting modernized and simplified, but Planet GNOME has fallen behind. Not anymore. I started a prototype for a Python script to publish Planet GNOME with GitLab Pages/CI.

    [...]

    P.S.: I know feed readers/parsers can over-request rss/atom feeds. So I plan to cache data and use metadata to avoid redundant downloads before this is even considered as a replacement for the current Planet implementation. No worries.

  • LWN ☛ Adding a JIT compiler to CPython

    One of the big-ticket items for the upcoming Python 3.13 release is an experimental just-in-time (JIT) compiler for the language; the other is, of course, the removal of the global interpreter lock (GIL), which is also an experiment. Brandt Bucher is a member of the Faster CPython project, which is working on making the reference implementation of the language faster via a variety of techniques. Last year at PyCon, he gave a talk about the specializing adaptive interpreter; at PyCon 2024 in Pittsburgh, he described the work he and others have been doing to add a copy-and-patch JIT compiler to CPython.

    [...]

    He began with a little bit about himself; "I started using Python about seven years ago and everything since then has been a kind of in a whirlwind". He started contributing code to Python, then joined the bug-triage team, and became a core developer after he worked on the structural-pattern-matching feature. He currently works on the Microsoft Faster CPython team ("it's my literal 'dream job'"); he helped to make CPython 3.11 25% faster for most workloads. More recently, he implemented the JIT compiler in order to continue improving the performance of the language.

• Rust

  • Rust Blog ☛ The Rust Programming Language Blog: Types Team Update and Roadmap

    It has been more than a year since the initial blog post announcing the Types team, and our initial set of goals. For details on what the team is, why it was formed, or our previously-stated overarching goals, go check out that blog post. In short the Types team's purview extends to the parts of the Rust language and compiler that involve the type system, e.g. type checking, trait solving, and borrow checking. Our short and long term goals effectively work to make the type system sound, consistent, extensible, and fast.

    Before getting into details, it's worth sharing a quick point: the team over the last year has been very successful. Oftentimes, it's hard to measure impact, particularly when long-term roadmap goals are hard to quantify progress on and various short-term goals either are hit or aren't. But, there is one clear statistic that is somewhat indicative of the team's progress: over the last year or so, more than 50 user-facing changes have landed, each separately approved by Types Team consensus through FCP.

• Niko Matsakis: More thoughts on claiming

  This is the first of what I think will be several follow-up posts to “Claiming, auto and otherwise”. This post is focused on clarifying and tweaking the design I laid out previously in response to some of the feedback I’ve gotten. In future posts I want to lay out some of the alternative designs I’ve heard.

• Debian Family

  • Daniel Pocock ☛ Julian Assange & Debian: was he a developer?

    I looked in the Debian people tracker and I couldn't find any record of Assange. I looked at contributors.debian.org and he is not there either. That doesn't mean he was not engaged in Debian in the past.

    In the very early days of Debian, the processes for accepting contributions and keeping a register of developers were far more informal than they are today.

• BSD

  • FreeBSD ☛ BSDCan 2024 Trip Report

    This year I was given the opportunity to travel to Ottawa for the BSDCan conference, and associated FreeBSD developer’s summit. This was my first time attending the conference, after several years of involvement in FreeBSD. My experience, summarized here, was quite amazing!