Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 22, 2025

• Miguel Young de la Sota ☛ Why SSA?

  If you’ve read anything about compilers in the last two decades or so, you have almost certainly heard of SSA compilers, a popular architecture featured in many optimizing compilers, including ahead-of-time compilers such as LLVM, GCC, Go, CUDA (and various shader compilers), Swift1, and MSVC2, and just-in-time compilers such as HotSpot C23, V84, SpiderMonkey5, LuaJIT, and the Android Runtime6.

• Buttondown LLC ☛ Modal editing is a weird historical contingency we have through sheer happenstance

  I think that modal editing is in the latter category. Vim is now very popular and has spawned numerous successors. But its key feature, modes, is not obviously-beneficial, to the point that if Bill Joy didn't make vi (vim's direct predecessor) fifty years ago I don't think we'd have any modal editors today.

• Daniel Stenberg ☛ A royal gold medal

  I am of course humbled and greatly honored to have been selected as a receiver of said award this year. To be recognized as someone who have contributed to creating a better society, selected by top people in competition with persons of remarkable track records and achievements. Not too shabby for a wannabe-engineer like myself who did not even attend university.

• Nelson Elhage ☛ Solving Regex Crosswords with Z3

  For a while now, I’ve been fascinated by Z3 and by SMT solving more broadly. While on pat leave recently, I was reminded of the existence of regular-expression crossword puzzles, and allowed myself to get nerdsniped by writing a Z3-backed solver.

  I expected to spend perhaps an afternoon cranking out a quick solver; I ended up getting sucked into understanding and debugging Z3 performance, and learning far more about Z3 and about SMT than I expected.

• Rlang ☛ Rfuzzycoco released on CRAN

  My Rfuzzycoco package just hit the CRAN: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/Rfuzzycoco/index.html !! Publishing to CRAN is a rigorous process, and it was particularly challenging as this package includes custom C++ code.

• Perl / Raku

  • Eskild Hustvedt ☛ The joy of rediscovering Perl

    So, since I wanted to get away from the node-ecosystem, and my static site generator was written in JS, I thought I would try my hand at writing one in Perl. This is the most fun I've had writing code for years. It's just so nice to write.

  • [Old] The Effective Perler ☛ Use v5.20 subroutine signatures – The Effective Perler

    Perl’s roots were in simplicity and getting started as quickly as possible. We wanted to define subroutines without much work. Instead of creating signatures in a C header file and worrying about inputs and outputs, Larry made subroutines take in lists and return lists. Done and done.

    This simplicity means you have to do quite a bit of work yourself. You have to process the input list, in @_, assign your own default values, and declare the variables to possibly store them. You ended up not saving much for the typical programmer.

  • Geeks For Geeks ☛ Function Signature in Perl

    A Perl function or subroutine is a group of statements that together perform a specific task. In every programming language user want to reuse the code. So the user puts the section of code in function or subroutine so that there will be no need to write code again and again. In Perl, the terms function, subroutine, and method are the same but in some programming languages, these are considered different. The word subroutines is used most in Perl programming because it is created using keyword sub. Whenever there is a call to the function, Perl stops executing all its program and jumps to the function to execute it and then returns back to the section of code that it was running earlier. One can avoid using the return statement. Defining Subroutines: The general form of defining the subroutine in Perl is as follows-

• Python

  • Chris Holdgraf ☛ The slow boring of hard boards in open source

    Python recently adopted PEP 751 for lockfile specification. Doing so required an enormous amount of work: [...]

  • Reuven Lerner ☛ Your personal mentor for Python and Pandas

    That’s why I’ve spent the last few months completely rebuilding LernerPython.com. It’s a complete, structured learning experience, not just a set of courses.

    Instead of leaving you on your own, here’s the system I’ve built: [...]