Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 29, 2025

• Sandor Dargo ☛ How to look up values in a map | Sandor Dargo's Blog

  Whether you’re in a coding interview or writing production code, you’ll eventually face the question: What’s the right way to look up values in a std::map or std::unordered_map? For simplicity, we’ll refer to both containers as maps in this post.

  Let’s explore the different options — along with their pros and cons.

• Stefan Marr ☛ How to Slow Down a Program? And Why it Can Be Useful.

  Most research on programming language performance asks a variation of a single question: how can we make some specific program faster? Sometimes we may even investigate how we can use less memory. This means a lot of research focuses solely on reducing the amount of resources needed to achieve some computational goal.

  So, why on earth might we be interested in slowing down programs then?

• Benjamin G Thompson ☛ Reflecting on a year of Gamedev in Zig9

  One year ago, I started programming a puzzle game from scratch in Zig. While it’s too early to announce the game (more on this later in the year), I want to share some of the insights I’ve gained about gamedev in Zig so far.

• R / R-Script

  • Rlang ☛ Plotting UK Maps with ggplot2

    I got this question: How can you plot a map of the UK with ggplot2?

    The answer is that you need to read a GeoJSON or equivalent file with the sf package and then use the geom_sf() function from ggplot2.

• Python

  • LWN ☛ Python: The Documentary

    Attendees at EuroPython had the chance to preview part of Python: The Documentary during a keynote panel. The full film, created by CultRepo, is now available on YouTube:

    This is the story of the world's most beloved programming language: Python. What began as a side project in Amsterdam during the 1990s became the software powering artificial intelligence, data science and some of the world's biggest companies. But Python's future wasn't certain; at one point it almost disappeared.

  • Dave Peck ☛ The premiere of Python: The Documentary

    The premiere of Python: The Documentary is just a couple hours away. It streams for free on YouTube at 10AM Pacific.

• Java

  • Farid Zakaria ☛ Bazel Knowledge: dive into unused_deps

    The Java language implementation for Bazel has a great feature called strict dependencies – the feature enforces that all directly used classes are loaded from jars provided by a target’s direct dependencies.