Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 23, 2026

• Anton Zhiyanov ☛ Interfaces and traits in C

  Everyone likes interfaces in Go and traits in Rust. Polymorphism without class-based hierarchies or inheritance seems to be the sweet spot. What if we try to implement this in C?

• Andrew Nesbitt ☛ A Protocol for Package Management

  Writing about testing package managers like Jepsen tests databases got me thinking about what sits underneath all the ecosystem-specific details. We can describe HTTP without talking about Apache or nginx. We can discuss database consistency models without reference to PostgreSQL or MySQL. But when we talk about package management, the conversation immediately becomes about npm’s node_modules hoisting or Cargo’s semver-compatible version deduplication or Go’s minimal version selection, rather than the underlying operations those are all implementations of.

• Martin Chang ☛ The Real Tenstorrent Tensix Programming Model (FOSDEM 2026 draft)

  The talk is "All in RISC-V, RISC-V All in AI: Solving Real AI Compute Challenges". I'm sharing the stage with DeepComputing because they have some fun ideas, and I had the last time to myself. This year I could use some rest. The title is more of a misnomer. What I actually want to share is what really hides under the hood and how by understanding it performance can be improved. Consider this a "How does a specific aspect of Tenstorrent chip work" talk. And if anyone wants to say "I can learn this by Google, duh" -- I am the reason you can Google this at all.

  The talk will largely pull experience from my RoPE post as reference material, since that post covers a lot of the core ideas and details.

• Michael Tsai ☛ Lessons From 14 Years at Google

• [Old] Maryanne Wachter ☛ The Bus Factor

  As a software engineer, there are a lot of parallels in the industry, but by the nature of the work, the deliverables of shipped code are one way to measure the bus factor. At least that's what a number of researchers have examined, including this paper, which has quite a number of citations (156 according to google scholar!) since it was first published in 2016 (with a preprint made available in 2015). Shae sent me the paper, and once we discovered the original data and the source code was readily available, it was the perfect candidate for a weekend project to at least get an idea of interesting open source metrics.

  The paper relies on the concept of degree of authorship "DOA" as calculated by the following formula: [...]

• Perl / Raku

  • Perl ☛ 2026-01-18 [Older] Cosmoshop supports the German Perl Workshop 2026

  • Perl ☛ 2026-01-18 [Older] What I released in 2025

  • Perl ☛ 2026-01-17 [Older] Geizhals Preisvergleich supports the German Perl Workshop 2026

  • Perl ☛ 2026-01-17 [Older] How can we make this Moose faster?

  • Perl ☛ 2026-01-16 [Older] This week in PSC (211) | 2026-01-12

  • Perl ☛ 2026-01-14 [Older] Understanding TPRF's Finance, 2026 Edition

• Python

  • LWN ☛ Pandas 3.0 released

    Version 3.0.0 of the pandas data analysis and manipulation library for Python has been released. Notable changes include a dedicated string type (str), new "copy-on-write" behavior, and much more. This release also removes a number of features that were deprecated in prior versions of pandas; developers are advised to upgrade to pandas 2.3 and ensure code is working without warnings before moving to 3.0. See the release notes for the full changelog.

• Java/Golang

  • Go Programming Language ☛ Results from the 2025 Go Developer Survey - The Go Programming Language

    Our three biggest findings are:

    • Broadly speaking, Go developers asked for help with identifying and applying best practices, making the most of the standard library, and expanding the language and built-in tooling with more modern capabilities.

    • Most Go developers are now using AI-powered development tools when seeking information (e.g., learning how to use a module) or toiling (e.g., writing repetitive blocks of similar code), but their satisfaction with these tools is middling due, in part, to quality concerns.

    • A surprisingly high proportion of respondents said they frequently need to review documentation for core go subcommands, including go build, go run, and go mod, suggesting meaningful room for improvement with the go command’s help system.