Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 14, 2025

• Andy Wingo: an annoying failure mode of copying nurseries

  I just found a funny failure mode in the Whippet garbage collector and thought readers might be amused.

  Say you have a semi-space nursery and a semi-space old generation.

• SaaS/Back End/Databases

  • Jamie Brandon ☛ The missing tier for query compilers

    Compiling queries also makes it easier to integrate external functions, foreign data wrappers, and procedural languages like PL/pgSQL directly into the generated query code, rather than trying to figure out how to vectorize code you didn't write.

    But where vectorized interpreters are becoming a commoditized component, each query compiler is a beautiful snowflake written from scratch. They are also kinda going out of fashion, for reasons we'll get into below.

• Education

  • Bodo Tasche ☛ 38c3 retrospective

    Yes, it’s true. Another year passed. And with it another CCC. Again with me sitting at home, enjoying a nice hot drink and watching the streams. Last years talks were great, but somehow this year’s even topped it.

• Content Management Systems (CMS) / Static Site Generators (SSG)

  • Bozhidar Batsov ☛ Running Jekyll on Ruby 3.4

    Eventually those libraries will be made Jekyll runtime dependencies and when a new version of Jekyll is released with this change, you can remove them from your Gemfile. I’ve noticed there’s already a Jekyll PR to address this problem, but it might be a while until it’s merged and a new release is cut. Sadly, Jekyll is pretty close to abandonware these days and every time something like this happens I’m thinking that I should probably look more closely into the alternatives.

• Games

  • Scott Percival ☛ Can you complete the Oregon Trail if you wait at a river for 14272 years: A study

    If you're into retro computing, you probably know about Oregon Trail; a simulation of the hardships faced by a group of colonists in 1848 as they travel by covered wagon from Independence Missouri to the Willamette Valley in Oregon. The game was wildly successful in the US education market, with the various editions selling 65 million copies. What you probably don't know is the game's great untold secret.

    Two years ago, Twitch streamer albrot discovered a bug in the code for crossing rivers. One of the options is to "wait to see if conditions improve"; waiting a day will consume food but not recalculate any health conditions, granting your party immortality.

  • Tom's Hardware ☛ Snake game port is only 56 bytes big and and fits in a QR code

    Ongoing efforts to make the most efficient DOS port for Snake culminate (at least for now) at just 56 bytes.

• Perl / Raku

  • Rakulang ☛ Rakudo Weekly 2025.02 Ditana

    Stefan Zipproth introduces Ditana, a highly configurable GNU/Linux with built in Hey Hi (AI) in a blog post titled “Unmatched Configuration Flexibility and Generic Hardware Detection“. Ditana GNU/Linux distinguishes itself from other distributions by providing a clean, JSON-driven configuration approach and a modern installer written in Raku.