Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 17, 2026

• Ian Duncan ☛ The Mathematics of Build Queue Optimization and Auto-Scaling

  A deep dive into queueing theory and auto-scaling for CI/CD build fleets, exploring when and how to optimize build infrastructure for both cost and developer productivity.

• [Old] Simon Stewart ☛ We're Going to Make Out Like Bandits

  Now, we also know that the tendency of the AIs isn’t to go and clean up code, reduce duplication, or focus on maintainability. Context windows (even the large ones!) can’t hold entire modern repos. They miss things. Most AI written code is additive, and is frequently duplicative. This is already happening.

  Machines have a higher “tolerance” for complexity than people, which means we can now bear higher complexity budgets and tech debt. That is, modern AIs tend to be very good at reading code and following the flow of control, often faster and better than people. However, “debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you’re as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it?” still holds true. At some point the tech debt and complexity will be so high even the AIs won’t be able to deal with it. We’ve already frequently blown past human levels of code complexity. This is already happening.

• LWN ☛ Woodruff: You shouldn't trust trusted publishing

  William Woodruff, better known online as "yossarian", has published a blog post to make the case that users should not place their trust in trusted publishing: [...]

• R T Feldman ☛ How Our Rust-to-Zig Rewrite is Going

  For the past year and a half, the team building Roc's compiler has been rewriting our 300,000 lines of Rust code into Zig, for reasons I'll recap below. We recently passed an exciting milestone: feature parity with the original compiler!

  Since the Bun project recently shared an experience report of their rewrite in the other direction (from Zig to Rust, although that's only the tip of the iceberg of differences between our rewrites), this seems like a nice time to reflect on how our move from Rust to Zig is going.

• Remi Collet ☛ Remi Collet: 🎲 PHP version 8.4.24RC1 and 8.5.9RC1

  Release Candidate versions are available in the testing repository for Fedora and Enterprise Linux (RHEL / CentOS / Alma / Rocky and other clones) to allow more people to test them. They are available as Software Collections, for parallel installation, the perfect solution for such tests, and as base packages.

• Perl / Raku

  • Perl ☛ perldelta - what is new for perl v5.44.0

    This document describes differences between the 5.42.0 release and the 5.44.0 release.

• R / R-Script

  • Rlang ☛ Five pre-flight checks for your dashboard

    So you’ve built your data pipeline, you’ve designed your dashboard and you’ve connected the two through a real app. The screenshots match the designs and you can show it off and wow the stakeholders. Ready to launch, right? Well, maybe. In this post we’ll cover five things that are easy to overlook: some worth a quick check, some you might not have thought to add.

• Java/Golang

  • Frank Delporte ☛ First Test of Java on Banana Pi (ARM and RISC-V), Plus a Blinking LED with Pi4J

    As part of my 2026 learning goals around Java on RISC-V (see this post about x86 versus ARM versus RISC-V ), I’ve asked various suppliers to send me evaluation boards. I already published these: [...]

• Rust

  • Rust Blog ☛ The Rust Programming Language Blog: crates.io: development update

    Another six months have passed since our last development update, and the crates.io team has been busy. Here's a summary of the most notable changes and improvements made to crates.io since then.

  • Niko Matsakis: Battery packs: Let's talk about crates, baby

    This blog post describes an idea I’ve been kicking around called battery packs. Battery packs are a curated set of crates arranged around a common theme.

  • Rust Blog ☛ The Rust Programming Language Blog: Announcing Rust 1.97.1

    The Rust team has published a new point release of Rust, 1.97.1. Rust is a programming language that is empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.