Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 07, 2026

• Rui Carmo ☛ C/C++ - Tao of Mac

  For all the scripting addicts out there, this is the language without a substr function (but with razor-sharp1 memory management).

• Ian Duncan ☛ In Praise of Control Planes, or: Why You Need a Place to Stand

  A control plane is a coordinator. It’s the part of a system that decides what should happen, while other parts (the workers, the data plane, the things that do the actual work) carry those decisions out. Boss and workers. Conductor and orchestra. Thermostat and furnace. This is not a profound architectural insight. It is, frankly, one of the oldest ideas in engineering.

  So why write a post about it?

• Andy Wingo ☛ ahead-of-time wasm gc in wastrel

  Hello friends! Today, a quick note: the Wastrel ahead-of-time WebAssembly compiler now supports managed memory via garbage collection!

• Alexandru Scvorțov ☛ Making sounds with WebAssembly

  Enough theory—let’s build something. From a programming point-of-view, our model of a loudspeaker is the simple electromagnet-drives-a-membrane one. When we send the loudspeaker -1.0, it pulls the membrane as much as possible. When we send it 1.0, it pushes the membrane as far as it goes. Smaller numbers move the membrane partway and that’s how we control volume. We’re expected to send 48,000 samples per second in modern audio.

• Python

  • Henry Schreiner ☛ New in boost-histogram 1.7 / Hist 2.10 -

    The biggest new feature is the MultiCell storage, our first new storage, which allows you to store a present number of weights into a single histogram. Here’s how it works: [...]

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • Ian Duncan ☛ No, Really, Bash Is Not Enough: Why Large-Scale CI Needs an Orchestrator - Ian Duncan - Ian Duncan

    In my previous post, I talked about why GitHub Actions is slowly hollowing out your engineering team, and I mentioned in passing that bash is not a build system. A number of people wrote in to disagree. Some were polite. Some were not. One person suggested I simply didn’t know how to write bash, which, fair, nobody really knows how to write bash1, we just accumulate coping mechanisms and call it expertise.

    But the most common response was some variant of: “I’ve been running CI with a Makefile and some shell scripts for years. It works fine.”

    I want to take this seriously, because it deserves to be taken seriously. Then I want to explain why it stops being true, and who this conversation is actually for.

• Java/Golang

  • Uğur Erdem Seyfi ☛ One Year of Using Go | rugu

    It has been about a year since I decided to learn Go, and more than half a year since I started working at an HFT company that uses it. This is not a very long time with the language, but some of my developer friends have already asked me about my impressions of Go.

    In this blog post, I want to share my overall experience with it. I will first explain why I felt the need to switch to Go in the first place. Then, I will describe what I did to learn it and how I improved over time. Finally, I will discuss my current impressions of Go, including what I like, what I do not like, and whether I would recommend it to others based on their goals.