Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 11, 2026

• Hackaday ☛ Turning A GDB Coredump Debug Session Into A Murder Mystery

  Debugging an application crash can oftentimes feel like you’re an intrepid detective in a grimy noir detective story, tasked with figuring out the sordid details behind an ugly crime. Slogging through scarce clues and vapid hints, you find yourself down in the dumps, contemplating the deeper meaning of life and the true nature of man, before hitting that eureka moment and cracking the case. One might say that this makes for a good game idea, and [Jonathan] would agree with that notion, thus creating the Fatal Core Dump game.

• University of Toronto ☛ The story of one of my worst programming failures

  Somewhat recently, GeePaw Hill shared the story of what he called his most humiliating experience as a skilled and successful computer programmer. It's an excellent, entertaining story with a lesson for all of us, so I urge you to read it. Today I'm going to tell the story of one of my great failures, where I may have quietly killed part of a professor's research project by developing on a too-small machine.

• Zig ☛ Type resolution redesign, with language changes to taste

  Today, I merged a 30,000 line PR after two (arguably three) months of work. The goal of this branch was to rework the Zig compiler’s internal type resolution logic to a more logical and straightforward design. It’s a quite exciting change for me personally, because it allowed me to clean up a bunch of the compiler guts, but it also has some nice user-facing changes which you might be interested in!

  For one thing, the Zig compiler is now lazier about analyzing the fields of types: if the type is never initialized, then there’s no need for Zig to care what that type “looks like”. This is important when you have a type which doubles as a namespace, a common pattern in modern Zig. For instance, when using std.Io.Writer, you don’t want the compiler to also pull in a bunch of code in std.Io! Here’s a straightforward example: [...]

• Daniel Stenberg ☛ Dependency tracking is hard

  curl and libcurl are written in C. Rather low level components present in many software systems.

  They are typically not part of any ecosystem at all. They’re just a tool and a library.

• Andy Wingo ☛ Andy Wingo: nominal types in webassembly

  Before the managed data types extension to WebAssembly was incorporated in the standard, there was a huge debate about type equality. The end result is that if you have two types in a Wasm module that look the same, like this: [...]

• Perl / Raku

  • Rakulang ☛ 2026.10 Climbing CragCLI

    You may have heard me mention App::Crag before – it’s a command line application implemented as a Raku module. CRAG is an acronym for Calculator using RAku Grammar.

    I have been working on it as a hobby for some time. I feel that now it is mature enough to bring it to the attention of a wider community (in this case, the r/CLI subreddit). Please give it a test drive and feel free to comment and feedback over there – maybe it will help to showcase the kind of cool stuff we have been keeping to ourselves.

• R / R-Script

  • Kieran Healy ☛ Using Quarto to Write a Book

    I’ve spent the last couple of months revising my Data Visualization book for a second edition that, ideally, will appear some time in the next twelve months. As with the first edition, I’ve posted a complete draft of the book at its website. The production process hasn’t started yet, so it’s not ready to pre-order or anything, but the site has a one-question form you can fill out that asks for your email address if you’d like to be notified with one (and only one) email when it’s available. A lot has changed since the first edition, reflecting changes both in R and ggplot specifically, and in the world of coding generally. I may end up highlighting some of those new elements in other posts. But here, I want to focus on some nerdy details involved in getting the book to its final draft. I’ll discuss Quarto, the publishing system I used, its many advantages, and its current limits with respect to the demands I made of it.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • GhosTTY ☛ Ghostty 1.3.0 - Release Notes

    Ghostty 1.3.0 is a significant release which includes many of the most requested features such as scrollback search, native scrollbars, click-to-move-cursor in shell prompts, and more. It also includes hundreds of improvements, bug fixes, and performance optimizations across all platforms.

    This release features 6 months of work with changes from 180 contributors over 2,858 commits. Thank you to all the contributors, maintainers, community moderators, translators, packagers, and users who each helped make this release possible.

• Java/Golang

  • Scoop News Group ☛ Critical defect in Java security engine poses serious downstream security risks

    The defect in the Java security engine, which handles authentication across multiple frameworks, has not been exploited in the wild since code review firm CodeAnt AI published a proof-of-concept exploit last week. The company discovered the vulnerability and privately reported it to pac4j’s maintainer, which disclosed the defect and released patches for affected versions of the library within two days.

    Some researchers told CyberScoop they are concerned about the vulnerability — CVE-2026-29000 — because it affects a widely deployed Java security engine that attackers can exploit with relative ease.

  • Frank Delporte ☛ Lottie4J 1.1.0: Better Rendering, Smarter Debugging, and an animated Lottie4J Logo!

    LottieFiles is a JSON-based animation format, originally developed at Airbnb, widely used to play back animations on websites and mobile apps. Players exist for JavaScript, Android, iOS, and more, but a Java/JavaFX player was missing. That’s the gap I want to fix with Lottie4J.

    The library is split into two Maven artifacts: [...]