news
Programming Leftovers
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Chris ☛ Flake Checks in Shell
These three steps are not strictly documented anywhere, but are all needed for a shell script to work as a good flake check.
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Ivan Enderlin ☛ About memory pressure, lock contention, and Data-oriented Design
I'm here to narrate you a story about performance. Recently, I was in the same room as some Memory Pressure and some Lock Contention. It took me a while to recognize them. Legend says it only happens in obscure, low-level systems, but I'm here to refute the legend. While exploring, I had the pleasure of fixing a funny bug in a higher-order stream: lucky us, to top it all off, we even have a sweet treat! This story is also a pretext to introduce you to Data-oriented Design, and to show how it improved execution time by 98.7% and throughput by 7718.5%. I believe we have all the ingredients for a juicy story. Let's cook, and bon appétit !
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Andrew Nesbitt ☛ Where Do Specifications Fit in the Dependency Tree?
Making specs explicit doesn’t require solving the whole problem at once. Some of the data model already exists: SPDX 3.0 includes a hasSpecification relationship type linking software elements to specifications, and CycloneDX 1.6 introduced “definitions” for standards and “declarations” for conformance attestation. But no package manager reads any of this, and no SBOM generator populates it automatically. A spec field in package metadata, even if it were just a list of RFC numbers or W3C shortnames, would let tooling answer questions that are currently impossible: which packages implement RFC 9110, how many depend on Unicode 15 character properties, which of your dependencies still implement TLS 1.2 and need to migrate. Spec authors, currently invisible in the software supply chain, would get the same transitive-dependent counts that help make the case for funding open source libraries. The Sovereign Tech Agency funds protocol implementations like curl and OpenSSL and is starting to explore supporting standards work directly, but nobody can yet point to a number and say this RFC has 400,000 transitive dependents.
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Rust
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It's FOSS ☛ Ladybird Browser Just Ported C++ Code to Rust in 2 Weeks Thanks to AI
Turns out Hey Hi (AI) is pretty handy when you need to port C++ code.
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Standards/Consortia
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Clayton Errington ☛ CSS is a programming language
For a long time, CSS was the “coloring book” and JavaScript was the “engine.” But the line has blurred so much that CSS is now technically Turing-complete (if you count the combination of HTML and CSS selectors).
The transition from static styling to “programming” really accelerated when we stopped asking CSS to just look a certain way and started asking it to calculate and behave.
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