Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 10, 2026

• Daniel Lemire ☛ A brief history of C/C++ programming languages

  Initially, we had languages like Fortran (1957), Pascal (1970), and C (1972). Fortran was designed for number crunching and scientific computing. Pascal was restrictive with respect to low-level access (it was deliberately “safe”, as meant for teaching structured programming). So C won out as a language that allowed low-level/unsafe programming (pointer arithmetic, direct memory access) while remaining general-purpose enough for systems work like Unix. To be fair, Pascal had descendants that are still around, but C clearly dominated.

• Andy Wingo ☛ Andy Wingo: wastrel milestone: full hoot support, with generational gc as a treat

  Hear ye, hear ye: Wastrel and Hoot means REPL!

  Which is to say, Wastrel can now make native binaries out of WebAssembly files as produced by the Hoot Scheme toolchain, up to and including a full read-eval-print loop. Like the REPL on the Hoot web page, but instead of requiring a browser, you can just run it on your console. Amazing stuff!

  try it at home

  First, we need the latest Hoot.

• Andreas Farre: BuildCache now works with mach

  I’m happy to announce that buildcache is now a first-class compiler cache in mach. This has been a long time coming, and I’m excited to finally see it land.

  For those unfamiliar, buildcache is a compiler cache that can drastically cut down your rebuild times by caching compilation results. It’s similar to ccache, but even more so sccache, in that it supports C/C++ out of the box, as well as Rust. It has some nice unique properties of its own though, which we’ll look at more closely in following posts.

• Thibault Martin: TIL that Helix and Typst are a match made in heaven

  I love Markdown with all my heart. It's a markup language so simple to understand that even people who are not software engineers can use it in a few minutes.

  The flip side of that coin if that Markdown is limited. It can let you create various title levels, bold, italics, strikethrough, tables, links, and a bit more, but not so much.

  When it comes to more complex documents, most people resort to full fledged office suite like Abusive Monopolist Microsoft Office or LibreOffice. Both have their merits, but office file f

• Trail of Bits ☛ Master C and C++ with our new Testing Handbook chapter

  We added a new chapter to our Testing Handbook: a comprehensive security checklist for C and C++ code. We’ve identified a broad range of common bug classes, known footguns, and API gotchas across C and C++ codebases and organized them into sections covering Linux, Windows, and seccomp. Whereas other handbook chapters focus on static and dynamic analysis, this chapter offers a strong basis for manual code review.

• Jim Nielsen ☛ Fewer Computers, Fewer Problems: Going Local With Builds & Deployments

  Me, in 2025, on Mastodon:

  I love tools like Netlify and deploying my small personal sites with git push

  But i'm not gonna lie, 2025 might be the year I go back to just doing builds locally and pushing the deploys from my computer.

  I'm sick of devops'ing stupid stuff because builds work on my machine and I have to spend that extra bit of time to ensure they also work on remote linux computers.

• R / R-Script

  • Rlang ☛ Using R to Teach R: Lessons for Software Development

    If you have read our blogs previously then you will be aware that Jumping Rivers is a consultancy and training provider in all things data science. But did you know that we offer over 50 different courses spanning R, Python, Git, SQL and more?

    In this blog we will provide a glimpse into our internal process and share how we have streamlined the task of maintaining so many courses. Along the way we will share some good practices applicable to any big coding project, including packaging of source code and automated CI/CD.

• Python

  • The New Stack ☛ PyTorch Foundation Expands AI Stack with Safetensors, ExecuTorch, and Helion

    Together, these projects provide vendor-neutral infrastructure for the entire AI lifecycle, from training through inference. In bringing Safetensors, ExecuTorch, and Helion into the fold, the foundation strengthens its position as the vendor-neutral hub for open source AI.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • Adam Johnson ☛ Zsh: select generated files with (om[1]) glob qualifiers

    In Zsh, we can avoid copying such generated filenames by using glob qualifiers, which are extra syntax you can add to filename globs in Zsh. Specifically, we want to attach the glob qualifiers om[1], which mean: [...]