Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 03, 2026

• Ginger Bill ☛ Was it really a Billion Dollar Mistake? - gingerBill

  TL;DR null pointer dereferences are empirically the easiest class of invalid memory addresses to catch at runtime, and are the least common kind of invalid memory addresses that happen in memory unsafe languages. The trivial solutions to remove the “problem” null pointers have numerous trade-offs which are not obvious, and the cause of why people think it is a “problem” comes from a specific kind of individual-element mindset.

• Perl / Raku

  • Perl ☛ 2025-12-29 [Older] ANNOUNCE: Perl.Wiki V 1.36

  • Perl ☛ 2025-12-22 [Older] Supercharge Event Loops with Thread::Subs

  • Arne Sommer ☛ MAD Shift with Raku

    The challenge texts vary in length, but the second one this time is quite possibly the most verbose so far. I have chosen to include said texts in my articles so that they can stand on their own. I am not ending that, but starting with this article the challenge text will be hidden by default. Click on the arrow symbol to unhide it.

• Java/Golang

  • University of Toronto ☛ A Go question: how do you test select based code?

    A while back I wrote an entry about understanding reading all available things from a Go channel (with a timeout), where the code used two selects to, well, let me quote myself: [...]