Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 20, 2026

• Hackaday ☛ QT6 Brings BASIC To The Web Browser, Or Your Computer

  This version of BASIC is based on KidBASIC, which was aimed at the educational market. It’s got some handy-dandy graphics routines, 64-bit variables, and other quality-of-life features you can find in the docs. The new port is multi-platform, though the MacOS version has only been compiled for Apple Silicon — less of an issue than it used to be — and the web version naturally can’t get access to hardware for, e.g., serial ports, so it is somewhat more limited than a full install. There’s a second ARM build for Raspberry Pi along with the ubiquitous x86, but the project is open source, so if you really want to run this on an UltraSPARC system, you are welcome to compile it there. That said, this is a beta version, and the dev is actively looking for problems — so give it a go and let them know.

• Sal ☛ And switched again, now deploying with wrangler

  My original description for this post was “don’t need no stinkin’ git cloud.” As in, after moving from GitLab to GitHub, I decided to eschew cloud git providers altogether and use my home server as my source of truth.

• Chris Done ☛ Lisp compilers that compile directly to assembly

  I’d like to point out one cool thing that some Lisp compilers, like SBCL, do. SBCL compiles functions and expressions directly to assembly. There aren’t other AST interpreter or byte-code interpreter modes, as seen in many other languages.

• Ben Deane ☛ A better bitset for enum flags

  TL;DR: using enum for bitflags is poor, but it’s what we’re likely to end up with.

  Many electrons have been spent expounding enumeration bitflag types (and not just in C++). As a tech community across multiple languages, we seem to be all in on the idea that the right way for this to look is something like: [...]

• Marc Coquand ☛ README.html - thunderbird-patch-review - Simple email patch review tool for Thunderbird

  Review git patches from email inside Thunderbird

• Bartosz Milewski ☛ Profunctor Optics

  You may think of Tannakian Reconstruction as an example of redundant encoding. It lets you replace a simple hom-set with a much more complex end that is taken over an entire functor category. Why would anyone want to do it? The answer is simple: composition!

• Perl / Raku

  • [Old] Geeks For Geeks ☛ Perl Programming Language

    Perl is a general purpose, high level interpreted and dynamic programming language. Perl supports both the procedural and Object-Oriented programming. Perl is a lot similar to C syntactically and is easy for the users who have knowledge of C, C++. Since Perl is a lot similar to other widely used languages syntactically, it is easier to code and learn in Perl. Programs can be written in Perl in any of the widely used text editors like Notepad++, gedit, etc.

  • [Old] Loyola Marymount University ☛ introperl

    Perl is a very dynamic scripting language that was hugely popular in the 1990s for web applications, and has always been used in system administration, networking, and bioinformatics. It is sometimes credited with bringing regular expressions and other forms of text processing to the masses. A fair amount of infrastructure code has been implemented in Perl.

  • [Old] Medium ☛ Perl Was a Meme. Now It’s Powering Critical Legacy Systems.

    But while we were laughing, Perl kept running the [Internet].

• Java/Golang

  • Nicolas Fränkel ☛ Security Baked Into the JVM: the Safe Codebase Audit Pipeline

    Distributed Java systems that load remote code are vulnerable to supply chain compromise: an attacker can replace a legitimate JAR with one containing malicious bytecode. The usual answer is to carefully vet your dependencies once, before deployment, by a human. That doesn’t scale to a dynamic service mesh where new proxies register at runtime.