Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 24, 2025

• Linuxiac ☛ QEMU and FFmpeg Founder Introduces Micro QuickJS JavaScript Engine

  Fabrice Bellard, founder of QEMU and FFmpeg, has published Micro QuickJS, a minimal JavaScript engine targeting embedded and low-memory environments.

• Sven Luijten ☛ Enable IntelliSense for PHP Extensions in PhpStorm

  If you want to use a non-standard PHP extension in your project (like Parle) you might run into a problem when trying to use it in PhpStorm: no IntelliSense! To fix this, all you need to do is enable the extension in PhpStorm's settings: [...]

• Andrew Nesbitt ☛ Could lockfiles just be SBOMs?

  Every package manager has its own lockfile format. Gemfile.lock, package-lock.json, yarn.lock, Cargo.lock, poetry.lock, composer.lock, go.sum. They all record roughly the same information: which packages were installed, at what versions, with what checksums, from where.

  Lockfiles are SBOMs.

• SusamPal ☛ My Coding Adventures in 2025 - Susam's Maze

  At the outset, I should mention that I have done less hobby computing this year than in the past few, largely because I spent a substantial portion of my leisure time studying Galois theory and algebraic graph theory. In case you are wondering where I am learning these subjects from, the books are Galois Theory, 5th ed. by Ian Stewart and Algebraic Graph Theory by Godsil and Royle. Both are absolutely fascinating subjects and the two books I mentioned are quite good as well. I highly recommend them.

  Now back to the coding adventures. Here they go: [...]

• [Old] Brent YorgeBrent Yorgey ☛ Random binary trees with a size-limited critical Boltzmann sampler

  Today I’d like to talk about generating random trees. First, some imports and such (this post is literate Haskell).

• [Old] Jens Alfke ☛ Easy Type-Safe Integer Types In C++

  I’m working on a somewhat intricate C++ project (a persistent storage manager) that internally uses a lot of different integral types: page numbers, page offsets, page-cache indexes, bucket indexes, hash codes, transaction sequence numbers… It’s very easy to get these mixed up, especially by passing parameters in the wrong order when a function takes more than one of these types; the results of that would be pretty bad.

• Kerrick Long ☛ Ratatui Bindings for Ruby

  I just published a new gem: ratatui_ruby, which offers Ratatui bindings for Ruby. It allows you to cook up Terminal User Interfaces in Ruby. I expect to write more about it in the coming days. Until then, check out the repo, the documentation, the examples, the mailing lists, the issue tracker, and the ruby gem!

• Chris Wellons ☛ Unix "find" expressions compiled to bytecode

  In preparation for a future project, I was thinking about at the unix find utility. It operates a file system hierarchies, with basic operations selected and filtered using a specialized expression language. Users compose operations using unary and binary operators, grouping with parentheses for precedence. find may apply the expression to a great many files, so compiling it into a bytecode, resolving as much as possible ahead of time, and minimizing the per-element work, seems like a prudent implementation strategy. With some thought, I worked out a technique to do so, which was simpler than I expected, and I’m pleased with the results. I was later surprised all the real world find implementations I examined use tree-walk interpreters instead. This article describes how my compiler works, with a runnable example, and lists ideas for improvements.

• Daniel Beskin ☛ The Compiler Is Your Best Friend, Stop Lying to It

  Note: this is a "script" for a podcast that I recently recorded, as such it's more conversational and less technical than the usual content of this blog. Not a single code block in sight...

• Ruby ☛ A New Look for Ruby's Documentation

  Following the ruby-lang.org redesign, we have more news to celebrate Ruby’s 30th anniversary: docs.ruby-lang.org has a completely new look with Aliki—RDoc’s new default theme.

• Rlang ☛ A Primer in Optimization + The Hitchhiker’apos;s Guide to Linear Models

  A tiny book on optimization theory bundled with a practical guide to estimating linear models using R.

• Rlang ☛ R and Shiny Services Custom R Packages and Scalable Shiny Applications

• Perl / Raku

  • Arne Sommer ☛ Binary Match with Raku

    You are given an array of strings.

    Write a script to return all strings that are a substring of another word in the given array in the order they occur.

• Python

  • Reuven Lerner ☛ Reuven's 2025 in review

    The biggest thing for me this year was the new LernerPython site. This site supports functionality that was previously impossible — and because it’s mine, it also allows me to fix problems and customize things more easily. I look forward to extending and customizing it even more in the coming months. Thanks to everyone who sent me bug reports about the site and course content during this transition period.