Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 08, 2025

• The Chip That Spoke Lisp

  What if the architecture of your computer - the fundamental way it thinks about memory and executes programs - wasn't built on ones and zeros in a straight line, but on the elegant, branching structures of a high-level programming language? In 1980, two computer scientists, Guy Lewis Steele Jr. and Gerald Jay Sussman, didn't just ask this question; they built the answer. Their paper, "Design of a LISP-Based Microprocessor," unveiled a vision that challenged the foundations of computing and resulted in a real, physical chip that "thought" in Lisp.

• LWN ☛ Notes from the 2025 Git Contributor's Summit

  Taylor Blau has posted an

  extensive set of notes from the recently concluded Git Contributor's

  Summit. Covered topics include the SHA-256 transition, Rust, Change-ID

  headers, Git 3.0, and many more. The note are also available on

  Google Docs for those who prefer that format.

• Ruby 3.4.7 Released

  Ruby 3.4.7 has been released.

  This release includes an update to the uri gem addressing CVE-2025-61594, along with other bug fixes. Please refer to the release notes on Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub for further details.

  We recommend updating your version of the uri gem. This release has been made for the convenience of those who wish to continue using it as a default gem.

  Ruby 3.4.8 is scheduled for December and 3.4.9 for February.

• Hackaday ☛ Tips For C Programming From Nic Barker

  If you’re going to be a hacker, learning C is a rite of passage. If you don’t have much experience with C, or if your experience is out of date, you very well may benefit from hearing [Nic Barker] explain tips for C programming.

• Python

  • LWN ☛ Python 3.14.0 released

    Version

    3.14.0 of the Python language has been released. There are a lot of

    changes this time around, including official support for free threading, template string literals, and much more; see

    the announcement for details.

• Rust

  • Niko Matsakis: The Handle trait

    There’s been a lot of discussion lately around ergonomic ref-counting. We had a lang-team design meeting and then a quite impactful discussion at the RustConf Unconf. I’ve been working for weeks on a follow-up post but today I realized what should’ve been obvious from the start – that if I’m taking that long to write a post, it means the post is too damned long. So I’m going to work through a series of smaller posts focused on individual takeaways and thoughts. And for the first one, I want to (a) bring back some of the context and (b) talk about an interesting question, what should we call the trait. My proposal, as the title suggests, is Handle – but I get ahead of myself.