news
Programming Leftovers
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Chris Wellons ☛ Freestyle linked lists tricks
Linked lists are a data structure basic building block, with especially flexible allocation behavior. They’re not just a useful starting point, but sometimes a sound foundation for future growth. I’m going to start with the beginner stuff, then without disrupting the original linked list, enhance it with new capabilities.
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Miod Vallat ☛ Copying memory is an art
Both ways of specifying arguments made sense, but the memcpy routine won over bcopy in the long run, and was incorporated into the first edition of the C language standard, in 1989.
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Ruby ☛ Ruby 4.0.0 Released
We are pleased to announce the release of Ruby 4.0.0. Ruby 4.0 introduces “Ruby Box” and “ZJIT”, and adds many improvements.
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Daniel Fedorin ☛ Reasons to Love the Field of Programming Languages
This caught me off-guard because I hadn’t even conceived of moving on. I don’t want to move on, because I love the field of programming languages. In addition, I have come to think there is something in PL for everyone, from theorists to developers to laypeople. So, in that spirit, I am writing this list as a non-exhaustive survey that holds the dual purpose of explaining my personal infatuation with PL, and providing others with ways to engage with PL that align with their existing interests. I try to provide rationale for each claim, but you can just read the reasons themselves and skip the rest.
My general thesis goes something like this: programming languages are a unique mix of the inherently human and social and the deeply mathematical, a mix that often remains deeply grounded in the practical, low-level realities of our hardware.
Personally, I find all of these properties equally important, but we have to start somewhere. Let’s begin with the human aspect of programming languages.
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[Old] Herb Sutter ☛ Trip report: November 2025 ISO C++ standards meeting (Kona, USA) – Sutter’s Mill
On Saturday, the ISO C++ committee completed the first of two final fit-and-finish meetings for C++26, in our meeting in Kona, USA. What we have in the C++26 working draft represents exactly the set of features we have consensus on so far; the goal of these last two meetings is to fix bugs and otherwise increase consensus for the C++26 standard. We are well on track to complete our work on C++26 and set it in stone at our next meeting in March 2026.
This meeting was hosted by the Standard C++ Foundation. Our hosts arranged for high-quality facilities for our six-day meeting from Monday through Saturday. We had about 200 attendees, about half in-person and half remote via Zoom, formally representing 21 nations. At each meeting we regularly have new guest attendees who have never attended before, and this time there were 17 new guest attendees, mostly in-person, in addition to new attendees who are official national body representatives. To all of them, once again welcome!
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Aethrvmn ☛ The supermarket
In 1997, when I was too young to know or care, an essay was written, called The Cathedral and the Bazaar, in which the parallelism was made that although closed source, “commercial”, software was designed top down, with a strict managerial hierarchy, FOS Software operated moreso in the way of a bazaar, with different developers operating their own stall, distributing their (soft)wares, debating, arguing, and moving their stalls around.
Although in some cases this still seems to be the perceived structure, there has obviously been a change in the last years, with the creation of “The * Foundation”, or the “*-community”, which are openly accessible, but centralised places for people to receive their (soft)wares. I like to call this new model “The Supermarket”.
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Devices/Embedded
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Larry Bank ☛ LCDs & C++ & Linux = Beginner-Friendly?
There are many reasons to choose a programming language and environment for your projects and products. C++ has gotten a reputation for being old, outdated, difficult to learn and full of dangers. Python is often proposed as a simpler alternative, especially for people new to programming. These statements all have merit, but I would like to propose an alternate way of thinking about it.
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Python
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Chris Wellons ☛ WebAssembly as a Python extension platform
Software above some complexity level tends to sport an extension language, becoming a kind of software platform itself. Lua fills this role well, and of course there’s JavaScript for web technologies. WebAssembly generalizes this, and any Wasm-targeting programming language can extend a Wasm-hosting application. It has more friction than supplying a script in a text file, but extension authors can write in their language of choice, and use more polished development tools — debugging, testing, etc. — than typically available for a typical extension language. Python is traditionally extended through native code behind a C interface, but it’s recently become practical to extend Python with Wasm. That is we can ship an architecture-independent Wasm blob inside a Python library, and use it without requiring a native toolchain on the host system. Let’s discuss two different use cases and their pitfalls.
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Miguel Grinberg ☛ A Year In Review: Flask in 2025
Before I start showing you numbers, I feel it is necessary to clarify that I have not used large language models (LLMs) or other generative AI tools to help me create the reports you will see in this article. Consequently, the chance I'm showing you hallucinated data is zero. The chance of me having made a mistake is not zero, however, so please do check my work and if you find any errors let me know so that I can correct them!
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Rust
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Rust Weekly Updates ☛ This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 632
Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust!
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