Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 13, 2025

• The New Stack ☛ The Herd Is Strong: PHP and Its Developer Ecosystem at 30

  This month marks the 30th anniversary of PHP being released to the world. To find out how PHP has evolved over the years, its technical improvements over the past decade, and the importance of PHP frameworks like Laravel and Symfony, I spoke to long-time PHP developer Derick Rethans.

  Rethans has been a PHP developer for 25 years and he first contributed to the project in 2001. He’s currently a core developer at the PHP Foundation, the non-profit organization that manages the PHP open source project. The PHP Foundation was launched in November 2021 by a coalition of companies including JetBrains, Automattic, Zend, Laravel, and Acquia (the custodian of Drupal).

• Sandor Dargo ☛ C++26: Disallow Binding a Returned Reference to a Temporary

  In short, thanks to P2748R5 by Brian Bi, it’s no longer possible to return a reference that binds to a temporary expression, and that’s just lovely.

• Max Bernstein ☛ What I talk about when I talk about IRs

  I have a lot of thoughts about the design of compiler intermediate representations (IRs). In this post I’m going to try and communicate some of those ideas and why I think they are important.

  The overarching idea is being able to make decisions with only local information.

  That comes in a couple of different flavors. We’ll assume that we’re compiling a method at a time, instead of a something more trace-like (tracing, tracelets, basic block versioning, etc).

• Open Source Technology Improvement Fund ☛ Ruby on Rails Audit Complete!

  The Open Source Technology Improvement Fund is proud to share the results of our security audit of Ruby on Rails. Ruby on Rails (or “Rails”) is an open source full stack web-application framework. Thanks to the help of X41 D-Sec, GitLab, and the Sovereign Tech Agency, Rails can provide more secure versions of the tools needed for users to create database-backed web applications following the Model-View-Controller pattern.

• LWN ☛ Summaries from the 2025 Python Language Summit

  The Python Software Foundation blog is carrying a

  set of detailed summaries from the 2025 Python Language Summit: [...]

  Topics covered include making breaking changes less painful, free-threaded

  Python, interaction with Rust, and challenges faced by the Steering

  Council.

• Perl / Raku

  • Paul Chochrane ☛ Analysing FIT data with Perl: producing PNG plots

    Something I like looking at is how my heart rate evolved throughout a ride; it gives me an idea of how much effort I was putting in. So, we’ll start off by looking at how the heart rate data varied over time. In other words, we want time on the x-axis and heart rate on the y-axis.

    One great thing about Gnuplot is that if you give it a format string for the time data, then plotting “just works”. In other words, explicit conversion to datetime data for the x-axis is unnecessary.

• R / R-Script

  • Rlang ☛ From lab to real life: How your Shiny application can survive its users

    You’ve created a fantastic mockup and your client is delighted. You’re ready to move to production with your application. But one question haunts you: how can you ensure that your application will remain stable and functional through modifications and evolutions?

    The answer comes down to one word: testing.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • Ruben Schade ☛ When a shell script (and this post) needs replacement

    The second context came from Mastodon, when someone I follow said (paraphrase):

    "Your shell script should be replaced with a real tool if it’s longer than a screen of text, or uses functions."

    [...]

    I orchestrate a shocking amount of my personal life with shell scripts. The shoemaker’s child walks barefoot—as the idiom goes—so while I use Ansible or Perl/Python/etc for anything more than trivial tasks at work, shell scripts rule the roost at home. I’m sure someone wittier could have come up with a pun to do with shells there. I… sea what I did there? Sorry, it’s been a long week.

• Rust

  • Rust Weekly Updates ☛ This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 603

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

• Entrapment (Microsoft GitHub)

  • Hackaday ☛ The Billionth Repository On GitHub Is Really Shitty [Ed: GitHub itself is malicious and dangerous; the number is inflated to pretend growth while traffic is down]

    What’s the GitHub repository you have created that you think is of most note? Which one do you think of as your magnum opus, the one that you will be remembered by? Was it the CAD files and schematics of a device for ending world hunger, or perhaps it was software designed to end poverty? Spare a thought for [AasishPokhrel] then, for his latest repository is one that he’ll be remembered by for all the wrong reasons. The poor guy created a repository with a scatalogical name, no doubt to store random things, but had the misfortune to inadvertently create the billionth repository on GitHub.

• Qt

  • Qt ☛ Qt Hey Hi (AI) Assistant 0.92 Released – Introducing the Code Review Agent [Ed: Qt is pushing sloppy slop, which is risk of GPL violations and generally produces crap "Code"]

    Qt Hey Hi (AI) Assistant v0.92 introduces the first agentic Hey Hi (AI) functionality and supports two additional Large Language Models.

  • KDAB ☛ Display Widget backdoored Windows in Qt Quick Applications

    This tutorial shows how to display Qt Widget windows in a Qt Quick application, combining the flexibility of both frameworks. Learn how to manage integration through C++, expose widget properties and signals to QML, and build multi-window UIs for desktop or embedded platforms from real world examples.