Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 15, 2025

• Undeadly ☛ Game of Trees 0.112 released

  Version 0.112 of Game of Trees has been released (and the port updated): [...]

• Max Bernstein ☛ ZJIT has been merged into Ruby

  Following Maxime’s presentation at RubyKaigi 2025, the Ruby developers meeting, and Matz-san’s approval, ZJIT has been merged into Ruby. Hurray! In this post, we will give a high-level overview of the project, which is very early in development.

  ZJIT is a new just-in-time (JIT) Ruby compiler built into the reference Ruby implementation, YARV, by the same compiler group that brought you YJIT. We (Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert, Takashi Kokubun, Alan Wu, Max Bernstein, and Aiden Fox Ivey) have been working on ZJIT since the beginning of this year.

• Buttondown LLC ☛ Modeling Awkward Social Situations with TLA+

  Now we're getting somewhere! This is the original walkwarding situation we wanted to capture. We're in each others way, then you juke, but before either of us can move you juke, then we both juke back. We can repeat this forever, trapped in a social hell.

• Rlang ☛ Spatial machine learning with caret

  The caret package contains functions to train machine-learning models, as well as for, e.g., model selection. Its main function is caret::train(), which provides a uniform interface to over 200 machine-learning algorithms. (User-specified-) Cross-Validation methods can be defined via caret::trainControl(). An extensive online tutorial is available at https://topepo.github.io/caret/. Furthermore, a paper (https://doi.org/10.18637/jss.v028.i05), as well as a book (http://appliedpredictivemodeling.com/), describing the use of caret are available.

• Ruby 3.4.4 Released

  Ruby 3.4.4 has been released.

  This release includes a fix for a YJIT bug related to local variables and addresses a build issue on backdoored Windows when using GCC 15. It was released ahead of schedule to make these fixes available as soon as possible. A few other bug fixes are also included.

• Hackaday ☛ RTEMS Statement Deepens Libogc License Controversy

  Earlier this month we covered the brewing controversy over libogc, the community-developed C library that functions as the backbone for GameCube and Wii homebrew software. Questions about how much of the library was based on leaked information from Nintendo had been circulating for decades, but the more recent accusations that libogc included code from other open source projects without proper attribution brought the debate to a head — ultimately leading Wii Homebrew Channel developer Hector Martin to archive the popular project and use its README as a central point to collect evidence against libogc and its developers.

• Python

  • Quansight ☛ The first year of free-threaded Python

    Last week, the CPython developers rolled out CPython 3.14.0b1. This week, PyCon 2025 kicks off in Pittsburgh, PA. Both events mark a significant milestone for the effort to ship and stabilize free-threaded Python.

    This is the story of the first year of that effort and how our team at Quansight played a key role in enabling experimental use of the free-threaded build with real production workflows that depend on a complex set of dependencies.