Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 21, 2025

• Beej ☛ Beej's Guide to Git

• [Old] Light Blue Touchpaper ☛ Trojan Source: Invisible Vulnerabilities

  We have discovered ways of manipulating the encoding of source code files so that human viewers and compilers see different logic. One particularly pernicious method uses Unicode directionality override characters to display code as an anagram of its true logic. We’ve verified that this attack works against C, C++, C#, JavaScript, Java, Rust, Go, and Python, and suspect that it will work against most other modern languages.

• Carlos Becker ☛ svu v3

  Back in 2017, I got tired of manually checking and creating git tags.

  I was running git tag to check what the latest tag is, then looking through the git log [last-tag]...HEAD to decide if I should bump major, feature, or patch, to only then run git tag [new-tag] to actually do it.

  It was cumbersome, error prone, and honestly, very boring.

  That’s why I created svu.

• The Register UK ☛ Type-safe C-killer Delphi turns 30

  Delphi is still very much with us, but the FOSS world also has its own, largely compatible, GUI-based Object Pascal environment – and it's worth a look.

• Linuxiac ☛ Sovereign Tech Agency Injects €515K into Eclipse Foundation

  The Sovereign Tech Agency has announced an investment of €515,200 to strengthen the Eclipse Foundation’s ecosystem, well-known for hosting key Java-based technologies, maintains widely used projects such as Eclipse IDE, Jakarta EE, Eclipse Jetty, Eclipse Temurin, and GlassFish. The funding will be mainly targeted in two areas.

• Armin Ronacher ☛ Ugly Code and Dumb Things

  There are two driving passions in my work. One is the love of creating beautiful, elegant code — making Open Source libraries and APIs that focus on clear design and reusability. The other passion is building quick, pragmatic solutions for real users (who may not even be developers). The latter usually in a setting of building a product, where the product is not the code. Here, speed and iteration matter more than beautiful code or reusability, because success hinges on shipping something people want.

  Flamework is in service of the latter, and in crass violation of the former.

• Karl Seguin ☛ Comparing Strings as Integers with @bitCast

  In the last blog posts, we looked at different ways to compare strings in Zig. A few posts back, we introduced Zig's @bitCast. As a quick recap, @bitCast lets us force a specific type onto a value. For example, the following prints 1067282596: [...]

• R

  • Rlang ☛ The REDATAM format and its challenges for data access and information creation in public policy

    I am glad to share my 1st PhD article in collaboration with Lital Barkai: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/dap.2025.4.

  • Rlang ☛ The Dynamic Relationship of Forks with their Upstream Repository

    The November coworking session welcomed Stefanie Butland from Openscapes as a co-host. She shared Openscapes’ approach of “Forking as a worldview”. Forks in the open-source software world refer to copies of an existing open-source project that add their own changes on top of the original codebase. Openscapes is extending this classic software development interpretation to an even more open philosophy of encouraging people to take anything that works to new places. Things like the value of sharing, reusing, and remixing of how we work, in addition to the work itself. Stefanie invited participants to share their experiences in forking to adapt or build on existing projects, and we came back to some practical challenges of forking.

  • Rlang ☛ cpp11armadillo: An R package to use the Armadillo C++ library

    This article introduces ‘cpp11armadillo’, an R package that integrates the highly efficient Armadillo C++ linear algebra library with R through the ‘cpp11’ interface. Designed to offer significant performance improvements for computationally intensive tasks, ‘cpp11armadillo’ simplifies the process of integrating C++ code into R. This package is particularly suited for R users requiring efficient matrix operations, especially in cases where vectorization is not possible. Our benchmarks demonstrate substantial speed gains over native R functions and Rcpp-based setups.

  • Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ RcppDE 0.1.8 on CRAN: Maintenance

    Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report. More detailed information is on the RcppDE page, or the repository.

  • Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp now used by 3000 CRAN packages!

    As of today, Rcpp stands at 3001 reverse-dependencies on CRAN. The graph on the left depicts the growth of Rcpp usage (as measured by Depends, Imports and LinkingTo, but excluding Suggests) over time.

• Perl / Raku

  • Perl ☛ What's new on CPAN - January 2025

    Welcome to “What’s new on CPAN”, a curated look at last month’s new CPAN uploads for your reading and programming pleasure. Enjoy!