Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 02, 2025

• LWN ☛ Git considers SHA-256, Rust, LLMs, and more

  The Git source-code management system is a foundational tool upon which much of the free-software community is based. For many people, Git simply works, though perhaps in quirky ways, so the activity of its development community may not often appear on their radar. There is a lot happening in the Git world at the moment, though, as the project works toward a 3.0 release sometime in 2026. Topics of interest in the Git community include the SHA-256 transition, the introduction of code written in Rust, and how the project should view contributions created with the assistance of large language models.

• GNU ☛ parallel @ Savannah: GNU Parallel 20251022 ('Goodall') released [stable]

  GNU Parallel 20251022 ('Goodall') has been released. It is available for download at: lbry://@GnuParallel:4

• Thibault Martin: From VS Code to Helix

  I created the website you're reading with VS Code. Behind the scenes I use Astro, a static site generator that gets out of the way while providing nice conveniences.

  Using VS Code was a no-brainer: everyone in the industry seems to at least be familiar with it, every project can be opened with it, and most projects can get enhancements and syntactic helpers in a few clicks. In short: VS Code is free, easy to use, and widely adopted.

• Kevin Burke ☛ Speeding up Javascript Test Time 1000x

  *This post originally appeared on Shyp's engineering blog in July 2015. It has since been deleted. It is reproduced as closely as possible here. The original is accessible on the Wayback Machine.

• Andy Wingo: wastrel, a profligate implementation of webassembly

  Hey hey hey good evening! Tonight a quick note on wastrel, a new WebAssembly implementation.

  a wasm-to-native compiler that goes through c

  Wastrel compiles Wasm modules to standalone binaries. It does so by emitting C and then compiling that C.

  Compiling Wasm to C isn’t new: Ben Smith wrote wasm2c back in the day and these days most people in this space use Bastien Müller‘s w2c2. These are great projects!

  Wastrel has two or three minor differences from these projects. Let’s lead with the most important one, despite the fact that it’s as yet vaporware: Wastrel aims to support automatic memory managment via WasmGC, by embedding the Whippet garbage collection library. (For the wingolog faithful, you can think of Wastrel as a Whiffle for Wasm.) This is the whole point! But let’s come back to it.

  The other differences are minor. Firstly, the CLI is more like wasmtime: instead of privileging the production of C, which you then incorporate into your project, Wastrel also compiles the C (by default), and even runs it, like wasmtime run.

• Python

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Open-source security group pulls out of U.S. grant, citing DEI restrictions

    The Forrest Dump administration’s zeal to stamp out diversity, equity and inclusion programs is affecting national cybersecurity research, as a key open-source security foundation announced it would reject federal grant funding.

  • LWN ☛ Explicit lazy imports for Python

    Importing modules in Python is ubiquitous; most Python programs start with at least a few import statements. But the performance impact of those imports can be large—and may be entirely wasted effort if the symbols imported end up being unused. There are multiple ways to lazily import modules, including one in the standard library, but none of them are part of the Python language itself. That may soon change, if the recently proposed PEP 810 ("Explicit lazy imports") is approved.

    Consider a Python command-line tool with multiple options, some of which require particular imports that others do not need; then a user invokes it with --help and has to wait for all of those imports to load before they see the simple usage text. Once they decide which option they were after, they have to wait again for the imports before the tool performs the operation they wanted. What if, instead, those imports could be delayed until they were actually needed in the Python code? That is the basic idea behind lazy imports.