Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 28, 2026

• Rakulang ☛ Rakudo Weekly 2026.17 Release #192

  On behalf of the Rakudo development team, I’m happy to announce the April 2026 release of Rakudo #192 – also known as 2026.04.

• Qt ☛ Qt Safe Renderer 2.2 Release Candidate 2 Released

  We have released Qt Safe Renderer 2.2 Release Candidate 2 for commercial license holders today. This release candidate provides bug fixes and documentation improvements made on top of the Qt Safe Renderer 2.2 release candidate 1. Also, the prebuilt Qt Safe Renderer binaries with Qt 6.8.7 are available. 

• Rlang ☛ March 2026 Top 40 New CRAN Packages

  Three hundred seventy-one of the new packages submitted to CRAN in March were still there in mid-April.

• Seth Michael Larson ☛ pip v26.1 adds support for relative dependency cooldowns

  Reminder that dependency cooldowns should be paired with a dependency management strategy that prioritizes dependency releases that fix vulnerabilities. You don't want to be waiting for days for a dependency cooldown to clear while your service is vulnerable. Managing, reviewing, upgrading, and deploying vulnerability patches should be a deliberate task, not one that happens "on-accident" due to an upgrade-by-default installation strategy.

  Andrew Nesbitt has published a comprehensive review of dependency cooldowns across many different package managers. Thanks to William Woodruff who originally published this approach.

• Feld ☛ Git Branches When Shallow Cloning

  Short but sweet: you have a shallow git clone like git clone --depth 1 ... and now you want to access another branch. It's not very clear how to do this, but this is the trick: [...]

• Den Odell ☛ The Design-Minded Engineer

  Designers have been complaining for decades that what ships doesn’t match what they designed. The fix isn’t better handoffs or AI tools. It’s engineers who can see what designers see.

• Andrew Nesbitt ☛ The stages of package installation

  Suppose, hypothetically, that someone had been spending their evenings reimplementing bits of several package managers from scratch, not to ship anything but as a test bed for swapping different resolvers, index formats, and registry APIs in and out to see what actually changes.

  One of the first things such a person would want is a clean decomposition of the install command into stages with well-defined inputs and outputs, so that each stage can be replaced independently and so that it’s obvious which parts need the network, which parts run untrusted code, and which parts are pure functions over data you already have.

• Daniel Lemire ☛ You can beat the binary search

  We sometimes have to look for a value in a sorted array. The simplest algorithm consists in just going through the values one by one, until we encounter the value, or exhaust the array. We sometimes call this algorithm a linear search. In C++, you can get the desired effect with the std::find function.

• Kiran Chauhan ☛ Let's Build the Terminal Pt. 1

  This is the first article in the series of the articles where we are going to build the terminal in C using GTK4 and VTE. The series is divided into three articles.

• Kiran Chauhan ☛ Let's Build the Terminal Pt. 2

  Let's continue from where we left off in the last article. Following is the code we have in terminal.c file.

• [Old] Dillo Browser ☛ Migrating Dillo from GitHub

  I would like to migrate the Dillo project away from GitHub into a new home which is more friendly to be used with Dillo and solves some of its problems. This page summarizes the current situation with GitHub and why I decided to move away from it into a self-hosted server with multiple mirrors in other forges.

• Collabora ☛ Git hooks, upgraded: What's new in Git 2.54 and coming in 2.55

  Collabora's contributions to Git 2.54 and the upcoming 2.55 add powerful config-based hooks with better visibility, opt-in parallel hook execution, and safer submodule handling via path-collision fixes.

• R / R-Script

  • Rlang ☛ Single vs Double Quotes in Command Line and R

    When feeding a program with command line arguments, single quotes and double quotes make a significant difference.

  • Rlang ☛ Little useless-useful R functions – Desk plant simulator

    Yes, we will grow a R plant in a simulation game with lots of twerks and hidden gems and ASCII art 🙂🙂

    And how this set of functions really work?

• Python

  • LWN ☛ pip 26.1 released

    Version 26.1 of the pip package installer for Python has been released.