Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 03, 2025

• AdventOfCode ☛ Day 2 - Advent of Code 2025

  They've even checked most of the product ID ranges already; they only have a few product ID ranges (your puzzle input) that you'll need to check. For example: [...]

• The Weekly Challenge ☛ Advent Calendar - December 2, 2025

  The 304 (Not Modified) status code indicates that a conditional GET or HEAD request has been received and would have resulted in a 200 (OK) response if it were not for the fact that the condition evaluated to false. In other words, there is no need for the server to transfer a representation of the target resource because the request indicates that the client, which made the request conditional, already has a valid representation; the server is therefore redirecting the client to make use of that stored representation as if it were the payload of a 200 (OK) response. (RFC 7232, Section 4.1)

• Trail of Bits ☛ Introducing constant-time support for LLVM to protect cryptographic code

  Trail of Bits has developed constant-time coding support for LLVM, providing developers with compiler-level guarantees that their cryptographic implementations remain secure against branching-related timing attacks. These changes are being reviewed and will be added in an upcoming release, LLVM 22. This work introduces the __builtin_ct_select family of intrinsics and supporting infrastructure that prevents the Clang compiler, and potentially other compilers built with LLVM, from inadvertently breaking carefully crafted constant-time code. This post will walk you through what we built, how it works, and what it supports. We’ll also discuss some of our future plans for extending this work.

• Juha-Matti Santala ☛ I built a tiny RSS generator for my Advent of Code solutions

  RSS/Atom feeds are one of the great technologies in the open web. They allow me to follow other people and them to follow me.

  This week, I started solving Advent of Code problems and this time I’m publishing my explanations as part of my Digital Garden and that doesn’t support separated RSS feeds for a subset of notes.

• James Kerr ☛ It's hard to deny the simple beauty of a function

  I love object-oriented programming. I love naming concepts and materializing them with a class. I love dot notation. I love hiding implementation behind a seemingly simple accessor. I’ve always leaned a little more on the side of OOP in the holy war against FP.

  But the more code I write, the harder it gets to deny the simple beauty of a function.

• Idiomdrottning ☛ Advent of Code, 2025

  Here is where I’ll post my solutions to Advent of Code using zshbrev. Spoilers ahead, and no promises that I’ll make it through the entire 12 days.

• Arjen Wiersma ☛ Advent of Code 2025 Day 2 | Arjen Wiersma

  The 2nd day had us do some magic with numbers. The quest was to find some silly patterns in the numbers. I chose to use good old regular expressions to do the job, while a colleague of mine chose to use math. Both work really well. The 2nd part of the puzzle is to find repeating patterns, where the 1st only wanted pairs.

• The Register UK ☛ Zig quits GitHub, gripes about Microsoft's AI obsession

  That timing appears notable. Last week, Andrew Kelly, president and lead developer of the Zig Software Foundation, announced that the Zig project is moving to Codeberg, a non-profit git hosting service, because GitHub no longer demonstrates commitment to engineering excellence.

• Trail of Bits ☛ Introducing constant-time support for LLVM to protect cryptographic code

  Trail of Bits has developed constant-time coding support for LLVM, providing developers with compiler-level guarantees that their cryptographic implementations remain secure against branching-related timing attacks. These changes are being reviewed and will be added in an upcoming release, LLVM 22. This work introduces the __builtin_ct_select family of intrinsics and supporting infrastructure that prevents the Clang compiler, and potentially other compilers built with LLVM, from inadvertently breaking carefully crafted constant-time code. This post will walk you through what we built, how it works, and what it supports. We’ll also discuss some of our future plans for extending this work.

• Perl / Raku

  • Perl ☛ Perl Advent Calendar 2025 - Santa's Secret Music Studio

    Now with a "digital audio workstation" app ("DAW"), you can orchestrate all your external MIDI instruments and record a masterpiece. But you can also control everything with Perl programs!

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • Seth Godin ☛ Rehearsing emotional state | Seth's Blog

    If we can trigger one for six minutes, perhaps we can do it for an hour.

• Java/Golang

  • Anton Zhiyanov ☛ Go proposal: Type-safe error checking

    Introducing errors.AsType — a modern, type-safe alternative to errors.As.

• Standards/Consortia

  • Mat Duggan ☛ Making RSS More Fun

    I don't like RSS readers. I know, this is blasphemous especially on a website where I'm actively encouraging you to subscribe through RSS. As someone writing stuff, RSS is great for me. I don't have to think about it, the requests are pretty light weight, I don't need to think about your personal data or what client you are using. So as a protocol RSS is great, no notes.