Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 18, 2026

• Daniel Stenberg ☛ My first 20,000 curl commits

  But yes, today I merged my 20,000th commit into the curl repository – out of a total of 37,604 commits (53%). Not that anyone is counting.

• Vlad-Stefan Harbuz ☛ How Binary Dependencies Work Across Different Languages

  Sometimes, your code depends on a library, but you don’t want to compile that library’s source code alongside your program. Rather, you want to directly call into a compiled binary of the library. This most frequently happens when you want to call a C library from languages like Python, JavaScript or Rust.

  In this situation, the library you’re calling is a binary dependency of your program.

• Andrew Nesbitt ☛ Lockfile Format Design and Tradeoffs

  Lockfiles record which packages were installed, at what versions, from where, with what checksums. Most package managers have one: Gemfile.lock, package-lock.json, Cargo.lock, poetry.lock, pnpm-lock.yaml. (Go splits this across go.mod and go.sum.) They solve the same problem but make different decisions about format, structure, and what to include.1

  A good lockfile format optimizes for mergeability, determinism, and external tooling compatibility, even when that means sacrificing compactness or human readability.

  Early lockfile formats prioritized getting resolution right over optimizing for version control. npm’s nested JSON matched its node_modules structure. Bundler’s custom format made dependency trees visible. Considerations like merge-friendliness came later, as projects grew and lockfile conflicts became a regular pain point.

• Perl / Raku

  • Perl ☛ 2026-01-12 [Older] Taking the Win - Perl in the TIOBE Index

  • Perl ☛ 2026-01-12 [Older] perlmodules.net is down for 1-2 weeks

  • Perl ☛ 2026-01-11 [Older] Marlin Racing

  • Perl ☛ 2026-01-10 [Older] ANNOUNCE: Perl.Wiki V 1.37

  • Perl ☛ 2026-01-07 [Older] DBIx::Class::Async - UPDATE

  • Perl ☛ 2026-01-06 [Older] This week in PSC (210) | 2026-01-05

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • Rich Trouton ☛ Enabling a standard user account to access the unified system log on macOS using the log command line tool | Der Flounder

    The combination of the two sometimes means I get halted while working because the log command line tool needs an account with admin privileges to run when it is getting log information from the unified system log on the Mac I’m using. Using the log command line tool doesn’t require root privileges or require admin authorization, but it needs to be run by a user with admin rights.

  • Karl Bartel ☛ Raising Notifications From Terminal

    When executing long-running jobs in the terminal, it's useful to get notified when they complete so you can do other things while waiting. Here are a few ways to achieve this.

• Java/Golang

  • Daniel Lemire ☛ A new way to call C from Java: how fast is it?

    Irrespective of your programming language of choice, calling C functions is often a necessity. For the longest time, the only standard way to call C was the Java Native Interface (JNI). But it was so painful that few dared to do it. I have heard it said that it was deliberately painful so that people would be enticed to use pure Java as much as possible.

    Since Java 22, there is a new approach called the Foreign Function & Memory API in java.lang.foreign. Let me go through step by step.