Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 28, 2025

• ByteSauna ☛ AI can code, but it can't build software

  Well, I think I know why we get these proposals. The thing is that AI can code, but it can't build software. This is the conclusion I've come to after spending a significant amount of time writing AI-assisted code and watching demos by other people.

  There is old wisdom that says: Coding is easy, software engineering is hard. It seems fair enough to say that LLMs are already able to automate a lot of coding. GPT-5 and the like solve isolated well-defined problems with a pretty nice success rate. Coding, however, is not what most people are getting paid for. Building a production-ready app is not coding, it’s software engineering.

• Leon Mika ☛ Devlog: UCL - Adding Some Missing Library Functions

  Working on UCL, adding some missing builtins I’ve been finding myself wanting. Nothing too interesting. Just functions like strs:has-prefix, strs:trim-suffix, and other functions involving strings and lists that are missing. That sort of thing.

• Keith Harrison ☛ SwiftUI Custom URL Schemes

  The URLSchemeHandler is a protocol with a reply method to return an async sequence of results. The AsyncSequence expects us to either yield a URLResponse and some data or throw an error.

• Idiomdrottning ☛ DSSSL with varargs

  This is so jank but I was frustrated with how the rest parameter redundantly has all the keywords left in (unlike stragglers in define-options) so I did a grobian solution at least for now: [...]

• MaskRay ☛ Stack walking: space and time trade-offs

  On most Linux platforms (except AArch32, which uses .ARM.exidx), DWARF .eh_frame is required for C++ exception handling and stack unwinding to restore callee-saved registers. While .eh_frame can be used for call trace recording, it is often criticized for its runtime overhead. As an alternative, developers can enable frame pointers, or adopt SFrame, a newer format designed specifically for profiling. This article examines the size overhead of enabling non-DWARF stack walking mechanisms when building several LLVM executables.

  Runtime performance analysis will be added in a future update.

• AdventOfCode ☛ About - Advent of Code 2025

  Advent of Code is an Advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like. People use them as interview prep, company training, university coursework, practice problems, a speed contest, or to challenge each other.

  You don't need a computer science background to participate - just a little programming knowledge and some problem solving skills will get you pretty far. Nor do you need a fancy computer; every problem has a solution that completes in at most 15 seconds on ten-year-old hardware.

• Lukáš Lalinský ☛ How I turned Zig into my favorite language to write network programs in

  Fast forward to today, I’m happy to introduce Zio, an asynchronous I/O and concurrency library for Zig. If you look at the examples, you will not really see where is the asynchronous I/O, but it’s there, in the background and that’s the point. Writing asynchronous code with callbacks is a pain. Not only that, it requires a lot of allocations, because you need state to survive across callbacks. Zio is an implementation of Go style concurrency, but limited to what’s possible in Zig. Zio tasks are stackful coroutines with fixed-size stacks. When you run stream.read(), this will initiate the I/O operation in the background and then suspend the current task until the I/O operation is done. When it’s done, the task will be resumed, and the result will be returned. That gives you the illusion of synchronous code, allowing for much simpler state management.

• Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: #054: Faster r-ci Contimuous Integration via r2u Container

  Welcome to post 54 in the R⁴ series.

  The topic of continuous integration has been a recurrent theme here at the R⁴ series.

• Rlang ☛ Tabler 0.1.0 is here!

  If this post is useful to you I kindly ask a minimal donation on Buy Me a Coffee. It shall be used to continue my Open Source efforts.
  

• Perl / Raku

  • Rakulang ☛ Raku Weekly 2025.43 Trick or Treat

    Raku Tips ‘n Tricks After a few weeks getting in the rhythm of editing the weekly, I feel that we could do a bit more to present the good stuff that Raku can do. Therefore, this is the start of a hopefully-to-become-regular section where we can share Raku tips and tricks with one another.

  • Rakulang ☛ 2025.43 Trick or Treat

    After a few weeks getting in the rhythm of editing the weekly, I feel that we could do a bit more to present the good stuff that Raku can do. Therefore, this is the start of a hopefully-to-become-regular section where we can share Raku tips and tricks with one another.

• Python

  • Didier Stevens ☛ Bytes over DNS Tools

    Here are the tools I used to conduct my “Bytes over DNS” tests.

• Rust

  • LWN ☛ Rust Coreutils 0.3.0 released

    Version 0.3.0 of Rust Coreutils, part of the uutils project, has been released.