Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 19, 2026

• Sandor Dargo ☛ C++26: std::is_within_lifetime

  When I was looking for the next topic for my posts, my eyes stopped on std::is_within_lifetime. Dealing with lifetime issues is a quite common source of bugs, after all. Then I clicked on the link and I read Checking if a union alternative is active. I scratched my head. Is the link correct?

  It is — and it totally makes sense.

• Logikal Solutions ☛ RPATH Notes

  Few things are more frustrating when first developing your own libraries than RPATH. There have been numerous hacks over the years. Gnu even gave us libtool because POSIX dlopen() just kinda sucked.

  Hey, for the end user, dlopen() mostly works. It finds dynamically linked libraries in the system standard search paths, all is well with the world. For the developer working on dynamically linked libraries or worse yet, plugins that use dynamically linked libraries from the same build, it is crawling naked across broken glass.

  There is a not bad explanation in this question. Yes, I was asking the question. You might want to read it now.

• Buttondown LLC ☛ Stream of Consciousness Driven Development

  This is something I just tried out last week but it seems to have enough potential to be worth showing unpolished. I was pairing with a client on writing a spec. I saw a problem with the spec, a convoluted way of fixing the spec. Instead of trying to verbally explain it, I started by creating a new markdown file: [...]

• Farid Zakaria ☛ Linker Pessimization

  In a previous post, I wrote about linker relaxation: the linker’s ability to replace a slower, larger instruction with a faster, smaller one when it has enough information at link time. For instance, an indirect call through the GOT can be relaxed into a direct call plus a nop. This is a well-known technique to optimize the instructions for performance.

  Does it ever make sense to go the other direction? 🤔

• Andy Wingo ☛ two mechanisms for dynamic type checks

  Today, a very quick note on dynamic instance type checks in virtual machines with single inheritance.

  The problem is that given an object o whose type is t, you want to check if o actually is of some more specific type u. To my knowledge, there are two sensible ways to implement these type checks.

• [Old] Vincent Driessen ☛ A successful Git branching model » nvie.com

  This model was conceived in 2010, now more than 10 years ago, and not very long after Git itself came into being. In those 10 years, git-flow (the branching model laid out in this article) has become hugely popular in many a software team to the point where people have started treating it like a standard of sorts — but unfortunately also as a dogma or panacea.

  During those 10 years, Git itself has taken the world by a storm, and the most popular type of software that is being developed with Git is shifting more towards web apps — at least in my filter bubble. Web apps are typically continuously delivered, not rolled back, and you don't have to support multiple versions of the software running in the wild.

• Tarek Ziadé: Running SmolLM-135M in rustnn with flexible inputs

  WebNN is emerging as a portable, browser-friendly inference API. But LLMs hit a hard wall: dynamic inputs.

  Autoregressive transformers fundamentally mutate state at runtime. KV cache tensors evolve at every step, sequence lengths vary with prompts, and shape expressions flow through operators like Shape, Gather, Concat, Reshape, and Expand.

  Today, this does not map cleanly to WebNN’s static-graph constraints.

• Rust Weekly Updates ☛ This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 639

  Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust!

• LWN ☛ An update to the malicious crate notification policy (Rust Blog)

  Adam Harvey, on behalf of the crates.io team has published a blog post to inform users of a change in their practice of publishing information about malicious Rust crates: [...]

• Qt ☛ Qt Quick Certification Tests Published

  In 2025, we launched the Qt Certification Testing Platform with the Qt Foundation certification, designed to validate essential Qt and C++ knowledge. Now, we're taking the next step by offering specialized certifications that focus on Qt's powerful Qt Quick technology.

• Python

  • Linux.org ☛ Python Series Part 23: Text Widget - Part 1

    Within Tkinter, there are text boxes that allow the entry or viewing of text. The text can be newly entered or edited by the user.

    From the programming side, you can format the text as you wish. There is the use of colors, fonts, etc. Keep in mind that the Text Object can be a single line of text or multi-line.

    Some of these parameters are basic ones that we've seen before, so we will pass over them with examples because they are general options that nearly all objects use.>

• R / R-Script

  • Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: qlcal 0.1.0 on CRAN: Easier Calendar Switching

    qlcal delivers the calendaring parts of QuantLib. It is provided (for the R package) as a set of included files, so the package is self-contained and does not depend on an external QuantLib library (which can be demanding to build). qlcal covers over sixty country / market calendars and can compute holiday lists, its complement (i.e. business day lists) and much more. Examples are in the README at the repository, the package page, and course at the CRAN package page.