Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 27, 2025

• RIPE ☛ Unlocking UX: A User-Centred Journey for RIPEstat

  Thanks to our extensive research, we confidently decided to retire the newer UI and focus entirely on improving the older interface. This decision was based on real user insights, not internal preferences. By consolidating efforts, we could enhance the user experience, reduce confusion, and allocate resources more effectively.

  Looking forward, future iterations will focus on improving the style and usability of each individual widget, ensuring a cohesive, accessible, and user-friendly experience across the entire platform.

  This project reinforced a critical UX lesson: design is not about trends, but about solving real problems. By putting research before assumptions, observation before quick fixes, and usability before aesthetics, we were able to guide RIPEstat toward a more sustainable and user-centred future.

• Sandor Dargo ☛ C++26: an undeprecated feature

  During the last two weeks, first we saw what are the language features deprecated or removed from C++26 then we did the same for library features. Life is not so straight and easy though. Sometimes, features cannot be removed after deprecation. There is an example for that in C++26 too. Which we are going to review today.

• Rachel ☛ Problems with the heap

  Again, this is not my world. I've never written a heap exploit, but reading about it briefly makes me think that there's meat on these bones.

  user1 does something... and gets user2 to blow up. If you can make that do something useful, then you get user2 to run stuff on your behalf.

• Karl Seguin ☛ Allocator.resize

  There are four important methods on Zig's std.mem.Allocator interface that Zig developers must be comfortable with: [...]

• Terence Eden ☛ Create a Table of Contents based on HTML Heading Elements

  It is not a good idea to use Regular Expressions to parse HTML - no matter how well-formed you think it is. Instead, use XPath to extract data from the DOM.

• Groot Koerkamp ☛ [WIP] Semi-global alignment, mapping, and string searching

  In this post, we will look at the problem of semi-global alignment, as a next step after previous posts on global alignment.

  In fact, we will quickly see that there is no such thing as ``just’’ global alignment. Rather, there are many variants that have applications in different domains.

  Thus, we will survey the problem of semi-global alignment. (It seems that this hasn’t really been done before.) We will briefly mention some existing algorithms and literature, but we’ll mostly just go ahead and (re)invent some ideas from scratch.

• Richard W.M. Jones: Graphical differences between two disk images

  I was investigating possible disk corruption when copying a disk image between servers, but needed a way to visualise what might be happening. The disk image is tens of gigabytes, so looking at it in hexdump wasn’t a lot of fun. A little Python to the rescue instead: [...]

• Ruby 3.2.8 Released

  Ruby 3.2.8 has been released. This release includes CVE-2025-27219, CVE-2025-27220 and CVE-2025-27221 fixes.

  [...]

  This version is a last version of normal maintenance for Ruby 3.2 series. We will fix only security issues for Ruby 3.2 series until end of March 2026.

  Please consider upgrading to Ruby 3.3 or 3.4 series.

• Ruby 3.1.7 Released

  Ruby 3.1.7 has been released. This release includes CVE-2025-27219, CVE-2025-27220 and CVE-2025-27221 fixes and update bundled REXML and RSS gems.

• Buttondown LLC ☛ Betteridge's Law of Software Engineering Specialness

  Logic for Programmers v0.8 now out!

  The new release has minor changes: new formatting for notes and a better introduction to predicates. I would have rolled it all into v0.9 next month but I like the monthly cadence. Get it here!

• Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppRedis 0.2.5 on CRAN: Fix Bashism in Configure, Maintenance

  A new minor release 0.2.5 of our RcppRedis package arrived on CRAN today. RcppRedis is one of several packages connecting R to the fabulous Redis in-memory datastructure store (and much more). RcppRedis does not pretend to be feature complete, but it may do some things faster than the other interfaces, and also offers an optional coupling with MessagePack binary (de)serialization via RcppMsgPack.

• Rust

  • Rust Blog ☛ The Rust Programming Language Blog: Adopting the FLS

    Adopting the FLS

    Some years ago, Ferrous Systems assembled a description of Rust called the FLS¹. They've since been faithfully maintaining and updating this document for new versions of Rust, and they've successfully used it to qualify toolchains based on Rust for use in safety-critical industries. Seeing this success, others have also begun to rely on the FLS for their own qualification efforts when building with Rust.

    The members of the Rust Project are passionate about shipping high quality tools that enable people to build reliable software at scale. Such software is exactly the kind needed by those in safety-critical industries, and consequently we've become increasingly interested in better understanding and serving the needs of these customers of our language and of our tools.

  • Rust Weekly Updates ☛ This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 592

    Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust!