news
Programming Leftovers
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Hackaday ☛ Recto: In Case Programming Isn’t Hard Enough
There’s long been a push to stop writing code as a sequence of lines and go to something graphical, which has been very successful in some areas and less so in others. But even when you use something graphical like Scratch, it is really standing in for lines of code? Many graphical environments are really just interface builders, and you still write traditional code underneath. [Masato Hagiwara] asks the question: Can you write code that is actually a 2D graphic? Where the graphical layout isn’t a cover for code, but is the code itself? His answer is Recto.
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MaskRay ☛ LLVM integrated assembler: Improving sections and symbols
In my previous post, LLVM integrated assembler: Improving expressions and relocations delved into enhancements made to LLVM's expression resolving and relocation generation. This post covers recent refinements to MC, focusing on sections and symbols.
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James G ☛ Designing a mobile-first HTML editor
Noticing this friction, I have been working on a concept for a mobile-first HTML editor. Its design is informed by the observation that switching between several keyboard contexts massively adds to the friction required to author a HTML document.
I have designed this tool with the goal that I could sketch HTML pages on the go. The goal is not to have a complete mobile development environment, rather a place to start exploring an idea.
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Brian Callahan ☛ Despite thoughts to the contrary, GNAT (Ada) is in fact fully supported on illumos
I am building a little script to automagically bootstrap GCC with the two difficult to build languages: Ada and D. They are difficult to build chiefly because they are written in themselves, so you need a working GNAT to build Ada and a working GDC to build D.
After getting the script to work on macOS, both arm64 and amd64, I turned my attention to other operating systems. There are of course the *BSDs, which should be no more difficult than macOS. And then there is illumos, the continuation of OpenSolaris. That seemed like a good next target.
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[Old] Socket Inc ☛ libxml2 Maintainer Ends Embargoed Vulnerability Reports, Citing Unsustainable Burden
“The basic idea is to treat security issues like any other bug," Wellnhofer wrote. "They will be made public immediately and fixed whenever maintainers have the time. There will be no deadlines. This policy will probably make some downstream users nervous, but maybe it encourages them to contribute a little more. The more I think about it, the more I realize that this is the only way forward.”
Wellnhofer’s blunt assessment is that coordinated disclosure mostly benefits large tech companies while leaving maintainers doing unpaid work. He criticized the OpenSSF and Linux Foundation membership costs as a financial barrier to single person maintainers gaining additional support.
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Rlang ☛ Global Modeling with GluonTS DeepAR: Future of Semiconductors in the U.S.
Bernstein has conducted an analysis of the U.S. supply and demand balance in analog and discrete semiconductors, particularly in light of the potential introduction of Section 232 tariffs. The analysis focuses on the implications for major companies, including Texas Instruments, Analog Devices, Infineon Technologies and Renesas.
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Simon Ser ☛ Simon Ser: Status update, August 2025
This month I’ve spent quite some time working on vali, a C library and code generator for the Varlink IPC protocol. It was formerly named “varlinkgen”, but the new name is shorter and more accurate (the library can be used without the code generator). I’ve fixed a bunch of bugs, updated the service implementation to use non-blocking IO, added some tests and support for continued calls (which are Varlink’s way to emit events from a service).
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Ruby gems still broken after 15 years
After 15 years since the first reports ruby gems remain broken, even tough I wrote the patch that fixes everything years ago.
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Python
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Python ☛ Functional Programming HOWTO
In this document, we’ll take a tour of Python’s features suitable for implementing programs in a functional style. After an introduction to the concepts of functional programming, we’ll look at language features such as iterators and generators and relevant library modules such as itertools and functools.
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Vincent Lammens ☛ Django Middleware to set REMOTE_IP to X-Forwarded-For
When deploying Django with gunicorn the request.META["REMOTE_IP"] value is not filled with the IP of the client, but usually the IP of the reverse proxy (or even left blank, when using a unix socket). We can fix this with a small piece of middleware: [...]
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