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Cassidy James Blaede Looking back on GNOME and Federico Mena-Quintero Still Pushing Rust
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Cassidy James Blaede: Looking back on GNOME in 2025—and looking forward to 2026
This past year has been an exceptional one for GNOME. The project released two excellent releases on schedule with GNOME 48 in March and GNOME 49 in September. Contributors have been relentless in delivering a set of new and improved default apps, constant performance improvements across the board benefitting everyone (but especially lower-specced hardware), a better experience on high end hardware like HiDPI and HDR displays, refined design and refreshed typography, all new digital wellbeing features and parental controls improvements, improved accessibility support across the entire platform, and much more.
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Federico Mena-Quintero: Mutation testing for librsvg
I was reading a blog post about the testing strategy for the Wild linker, when I came upon a link to cargo-mutants, a mutation testing tool for Rust. The tool promised to be easy to set up, so I gave it a try. I'm happy to find that it totally delivers!
Briefly: mutation testing catches cases where bugs are deliberately inserted in the source code, but the test suite fails to catch them: after making the incorrect changes, all the tests still pass. This indicates a gap in the test suite.
Previously I had only seen mentions of "mutation testing" in passing, as something exotic to be done when testing compilers. I don't recall seeing it as a general tool; maybe I have not been looking closely enough.