Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 29, 2025

• Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 14.4.1-1 on CRAN: Small Upstream Fix

  Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is widely used by (currently) 1236 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 39 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 620 times according to Google Scholar.

• Rlang ☛ February 2025 Top 40 New CRAN Packages

  In February, one hundred fifty-nine new packages made it to CRAN. Here are my Top 40 picks in fifteen categories: Artificial Intelligence, Computational Methods, Ecology, Genomics, Health Sciences, Mathematics, Machine Learning, Medicine, Music, Pharma, Statistics, Time Series, Utilities, Visualization, and Weather.

• Max Bernstein ☛ Parsing to IR and lvalues

  I don’t want an AST in my hobby compiler. I’m not going to use it for analysis—it would just be a stepping stone representation on the way to the thing I really want, which is an SSA CFG. So I decided to parse straight from tokens into an SSA IR. I ran into some issues, fixed them, and would like to share the implementation. Maybe it’s a normal strategy, maybe it’s not.

• Malcom Coles ☛ Design Needs More Brutalism

  I think design could use a fresh injection of Brutalism. Stop making things cute just because it looks neat. Make the design useful, first, and then maybe, MAYBE, add some fluff to it. But, whatever you do, don’t make your design philosophy actively hostile to the user like Material Design.

• Qt ☛ Qt for Android Automotive 6.8.3 is released

  The latest patch release for Android Automotive 6.8.3 is just released. This release is based on Qt LTS 6.8.3 with 300 bug fixes, security updates, and other improvements done to Qt base. There are no additional Qt for Android Automotive features delivered with 6.8.3.

• Games

  • Javier Martinez Canillas ☛ Creating an ESP32 based dice for chess

    So I wrote esp32-dice-chess which is just a simple program to randomly choose a chess piece and shows its image on a screen. The code is meant to be used on a T-Display-S3 but it should be easy to port it to a different board.

  • Godot Engine ☛ Godot XR update - March 2025

    Godot XR Community Game Jam February 2025

• Python

  • [Old] Tom's Hardware ☛ How To Use Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3 with Python Code

    The Raspberry Pi has many of the best accessories and one that is sure to appear on that list is the new Camera Module 3. In our Raspberry Pi Camera Module 3 review, we said that we love the fast autofocus and HDR images and we want to share these features with you in this how to.

• Rust

  • Diziet ☛ Ian Jackson: Rust is indeed woke [Ed: How to pretend people who oppose Microsoft GitHub, social engineering, legal risks and interferences in projects are just some "bigots" whose concerns are invalid]

    Rust, and resistance to it in some parts of the GNU/Linux community, has been in my feed recently. One undercurrent seems to be the notion that Rust is woke (and should therefore be rejected as part of culture wars).

    I’m going to argue that Rust, the language, is woke. So the opponents are right, in that sense. Of course, as ever, dissing something for being woke is nasty and fascist-adjacent.