Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jun 26, 2025

• Qt ☛ What's New in QML formatting

  The latest updates to qmlformat, Qt's own tool for formatting of QML files, bring two practical improvements: configurable line breaking and automatic import sorting. These features enhance code readability and maintainability, making them valuable additions worth highlighting.

• Qt ☛ How Qt Helped Him Build a Career in Cross-Platform App Development

  At Qt, we often say it's not just about building software—it's about building something that matters. And when you talk to people who’ve spent years in the craft, you realize it's also about finding the right tools, the right community, and the freedom to create.

• User Friendly Canned Reponses UI and More Details of a Report

  The latest improvements under the Content Moderation umbrella involves the Canned Responses UI which is more user friendly and additional information are provided for the report overview. Content Moderation is part of the beta program. Our journey into content moderation began back in October 2023, initially addressing comment locks and report categories.

• Sandor Dargo ☛ Once more about dynamic_cast, a real use case

  I wrote a couple of times about dynamic_cast and I discouraged you from using it. In general, it makes code worse in terms of readability. When you get rid of dynamic_cast, either via self-discipline or by turning RTTI off, you’ll have to rely on dynamic dispatching and better abstractions.

• University of Toronto ☛ Some bits on malloc(0) in C being allowed to return NULL

  One of the little traps in standard C and POSIX is that malloc(0) is allowed to return NULL instead of a pointer. This makes people unhappy for various reasons. Today I wound up reading 017. malloc(0) & realloc(…, 0) ≠ 0, which runs through a whole collection of Unix malloc() versions and finds almost none of them which return NULL on malloc(0) except for some Unix System V releases that ship with an optional 'fast' malloc library that does return NULL on zero-sized allocations. Then AT&T wrote the System V Interface Definition and requires this 'fast malloc' behavior, except that actual System V releases (probably) didn't behave this way unless you explicitly used the fast malloc instead of the standard one.

• Ava ☛ file number counter in quartz

  As mentioned in a previous post, I am using Quartz to build a public knowledge vault from parts of my Obsidian notes. You can find that site here (WIP; and the sidebar currently has a duplication bug, ignore that for now).

• R / R-Script

  • Rlang ☛ Shiny in Production 2025: Lightning Talk Lineup

    conference! We’ve already announced the full length talks (25 minutes each) in

    this blog. This blog however is all about

    this year’s lightning talks session (5 minutes per talk).

  • Rlang ☛ Specialized R packages for spatial machine learning: An introduction to RandomForestsGLS, spatialRF, and meteo

    This is the fifth part of a blog post series on spatial machine learning with R.

  • Rlang ☛ How to open files, folders, websites in R

    Coming to you from France, a post about Mise en place for R projects. In a less francophone phrasing: to get to work on something you have to open that thing, be it a script or a project or a website. The easier that is, the faster you get to work. In this post I’ll show a roundup of R functions and related tools for opening scripts, projects and websites for yourself or on behalf of the users of your code.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • Sigma Star gmbh ☛ Deep Down the Rabbit Hole: Bash, OverlayFS, and a 30-Year-Old Surprise

    This blog post recounts a recent debugging session that uncovered a surprising set of issues involving Bash, getcwd()1, and OverlayFS2. What began as a simple customer bug report evolved into a deep dive worth sharing.

• Golang

  • Tony Finch ☛ Golang and Let's Encrypt: a free software story

    At the time I had previously been responsible for Cambridge University’s email anti-spam system for about 10 years, and in 2014 I had been given responsibility for Cambridge University’s DNS. So I knew how Let’s Encrypt should validate mail domains.

• Rust

  • Collabora ☛ Coccinelle for Rust progress report

    In collaboration with Inria, the French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation, Tathagata Roy shares the progress made over the past year on the CoccinelleForRust project, co-sponsored by Collabora