Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 14, 2026

• Sebastian ☛ a bunch of stuff i used to not know about K&R C

  ok so i've been reading the "specification" from "the c programming language" (1st edition). alongside that, i've also been reading the c89 rationale document, and the source code for the 7th edition unix c compiler. i've also been reading some other related stuff.

  and i didn't really know anything about pre-ansi c until i did this research, but i found a bunch of stuff, so i'm documenting my findings here :3

• Andrew Nesbitt ☛ This Week in Package Management: 11 July 2026

  Week eight of the roundup, built from the package manager OPML feed collection and whatever I’ve posted or boosted on Mastodon.

• Alisa Sireneva ☛ Quadrupling code performance with a "useless" if

  One important problem was chunking the input string and optimally choosing the most compact encoding for each chunk (different encodings compress different characters better, so where to split is not immediately obvious). The previous post describes the algorithm if you’re interested, but it boils down to finding the shortest path on a grid. For each cell, the algorithm computes the best cell following it. Following references from the first cell to the last one gives the optimal coding order.

• Adam Silver ☛ Interaction design vs content design vs service design – Adam Silver – designer, London, UK

  Last week, Kate Ivey-Williams, the Head of UCD on my programme, asked me:

  “What do you think your role is as a designer?”

• Perl / Raku

  • Perl ☛ "I had a dream" - Announcing PetaPerl 0.6.0

    Over twenty-five years ago, when PetaMem was still in its infancy but the use of Perl for its NLP/NLU systems was already a given (Natural Language Processing / Natural Language Understanding - we did not dare to call it AI back then), slightly before the 5.8 era and in a still-young SMP environment, I envisioned a perl that would autoparallelize. That is: dispatch your code onto the available CPUs, automatically. The idea was not mine. I had seen it sometime in the nineties at the CeBIT computer fair, at the SGI booth, where their C compiler was doing exactly that.

    The vision evolved into a wish, and the wish, refined over the years, into a resolution: should PetaMem ever have the resources to fund the R&D team this would need - realistically at least twenty people, or five Jonathan Worthingtons - we would do it. 2025 was a remarkable year for us technology-wise, and when Christmas came, the decision was made: requisition said twenty … or fifty “people”, and build an autoparallelizing perl with a JIT.

    PetaPerl was born.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • Cédric ☛ Improvement of the Smart Menu Bar Management script

    I’ve made a few updates to my Bartender triggers that allow me to switch configurations depending on whether the screen has a notch or not.

• R

  • Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: Rcpp 1.1.2 on CRAN: Usual Improvements in Semi-Annual Update

    Team Rcpp is excited to share that an brandnew new version 1.1.2 of Rcpp is now on CRAN, has also been uploaded to Debian, and has already built for r2u and r-universe; Windows etc builds at CRAN should follow in due course.