Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 13, 2026

• Sandor Dargo ☛ C++26: std::indirect

  C++26 adds two new vocabulary types in &nl;memory>, introduced by P3019R14 (Coe, Peacock, Parent). From the abstract: [...]

• Peter Mbanugo ☛ A Crash Course on Concurrency: Build a Tiny Scheduler from Scratch

  Concurrency is something we use and experience every day. Yet, concurrent systems fail in interesting ways, for various reasons. One of them is that some of us don’t understand how the concurrency runtimes or libraries we use work, which leads to poor use. I’m not going to argue Async/Await vs Fibers or Coroutines, I’ll leave that to the details of my P99 Conference talk coming up in October 2026.

• KDAB ☛ µ-Boosting Your CMake Productivity with Environment Variables

  Save yourself repetitive typing: CMake can read configuration values straight from environment variables, letting you set your preferred generator, enable compile_commands.json, and more - once in your shell config, applied to every build folder from then on.

• Python

  • Juha-Matti Santala ☛ K is for keyword arguments

    In PyCon US 2013, Raymond Hettinger talked about writing beautiful, idiomatic Python. It’s a great talk but for this post, I’ll focus on what he talks about around 30 minute mark.

    He shares an example (which dates the talk and example nicely; those were the times)

  • Adam Johnson ☛ Python: introducing emojet, a fast emoji lookup library

    emojet is an emoji library for Python: it converts between emoji and their names, in both directions, plus the searching and lookup functions that go with that. It covers the core API of the emoji package, a library that been available for this job since 2014, using the same names and the same data. The difference is that emojet does the work in Rust, running 3.5x faster for conversion, 70 times faster for deconversion, and using about 40% less memory.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • John D Cook ☛ Cryptic but consistent

    Although the command line is cryptic, it is also consistent. On the command line, and in Unix [1] culture more generally, ! refers to a command. For example, you can run a command from inside the Vim text editor with the :! command. And $ often refers to the end of something, such as the end of a string in a regex. So you type !, telling the shell that you’re about to refer to part of a string, then type $ to specify that last part.