news
Programming Leftovers
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Linuxiac ☛ Qt 6.10 Released With Flexbox Layout, New SearchField
Qt, a cross-platform software development framework widely used for designing and deploying graphical user interfaces (and the backbone of the widely adopted KDE desktop environment), has just released its latest version, 6.10.
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Daniel Lemire ☛ Aesthetics matter
Why would anyone write a book entitled Beautiful Code?
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Sandor Dargo ☛ C++26: range support for std::optional
I learned about the new range API of std::optional from Steve Downey at CppCon 2025 during his talk about std::optional<T&>. To be honest, I found the idea quite strange at first. I wanted to dig deeper to understand the motivation and the implications.
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The New Stack ☛ Survey: Engineers Want To Code, But Spend All Day on Tech Debt
That’s the key finding from Chainguard‘s 2026 Engineering Reality Report, released today, which surveyed 1,200 software engineers and tech leaders across the US and Europe. The numbers are stark: Engineers spend just 16% of their week writing code and building new features, despite 93% saying that’s the most rewarding part of their jobs.
What do they do with the rest of their time? Code maintenance, technical debt and wrestling with fragmented tools.
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Julia Programming Language ☛ Julia 1.12 Highlights
Julia version 1.12 has finally been released. We want to thank all the contributors to this release and all the testers who helped find regressions and issues in the pre-releases. Without you, this release would not have been possible.
The full list of changes can be found in the NEWS file, but here we'll give a more in-depth overview of some of the release highlights.
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R / R-Script
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Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ RPushbullet 0.3.5: Mostly Maintenance
Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is a diffstat report relative to previous release. More detailed information is on the repo where comments and suggestions are welcome.
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Python
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The Register UK ☛ Python 3.14 released with cautious free-threaded support
Free threading in Python, which disables the global interpreter lock (GIL), is now a complete implementation of PEP (Python Enhancement Proposal) 703, a much anticipated feature which makes concurrent programming in Python natural. Free-threaded mode also enables a specialized adaptive interpreter, originally part of the Faster CPython project led by Mark Shannon at Microsoft (though the company axed its support in May).
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Miguel Grinberg ☛ Python 3.14 Is Here. How Fast Is It?
In November of 2024 I wrote a blog post titled "Is Python Really That Slow?", in which I tested several versions of Python and noted the steady progress the language has been making in terms of performance.
Today is the 8th of October 2025, just a day after the official release of Python 3.14. Let's rerun the benchmarks to find out how fast the new version of Python is!
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Linuxiac ☛ Python 3.14 Released With Free-Threaded Mode
One of the biggest additions in this release is free-threaded Python, which removes the Global Interpreter Lock and allows true parallel execution. This long-awaited change enables developers to leverage multicore CPUs fully and opens up new possibilities for building high-performance applications in pure Python. According to devs, it’s one of the most significant steps forward in Python’s history.
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Simon Willison ☛ Python 3.14
Python 3.14. This year's major Python version, Python 3.14, just made its first stable release!
As usual the what's new in Python 3.14 document is the best place to get familiar with the new release: [...]
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Perl
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André Machado ☛ Perl Isn't Dead: The Art of Crafting Files with Perl
Rumors about the end of Perl surface every few years, yet the language continues to anchor automation in operations teams, research labs, and publishing platforms. Its expressive syntax and mature interpreter make it perfect for connecting services, scraping data, and shaping text pipelines that would otherwise demand entire frameworks. Perl earns loyalty because it stays portable, dependable, and available on every system that ships with a command line.
The language invites experimentation without compromising performance. Developers can compose expressive regular expressions, tap into an immense CPAN ecosystem, and iterate quickly across environments. Perl thrives in spaces where scripting speed meets engineering rigor, and that balance keeps it invaluable for any project that needs repeatable results.
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Java/Golang
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Ted Unangst ☛ backporting go on openbsd
The OpenBSD ports tree generally tracks current, but sometimes backports (and stable packages) are made for more serious issues. As was the case for git 2.50.1. However, the go port has not seen a backport in quite some time. The OpenBSD release schedule aligns with the go schedule such that we always get the latest release, but not minor revisions.
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Standards/Consortia
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Jono Alderson ☛ The death of a website
The homepage was still up on a monitor, looping a loading animation like a bad joke. Looked fine from across the room – gradients, glassy buttons, a hero image big enough to land a plane on. But the moment I hit View Source, I knew I was staring at another corpse.
Same story as the last dozen. No pulse, no structure, no soul. Just a tangle of wrappers, scripts, and styles, every line stepping on the toes of the one before it. A thousand dependencies all arguing about whose fault it was.
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