Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 19, 2026

• Yossi Kreinin ☛ Unit tests mark territory more than squash bugs

  But we could look at it from another angle — how is software actually tested, and why? I mean, if you don’t care about bugs, you could have no tests at all, which indeed was fairly common till the 2010s. Now, on the other hand, you have unit tests roughly doubling the size of the code base on average. What happened, and what does this testing buy the programmers doing it?

  Unit testing definitely doesn’t do much in terms of squashing non-trivial bugs, for two reasons: [...]

• Tyler Sticka ☛ That Tear-Off Tab Copy Button Effect

  I won’t dive deeply into how the effect works, as the details are pretty specific to my site. At a high level, I’m applying the same jagged clip-path to the button and an element matching the page background color, placing them in the same grid cell, then translating and rotating the button alone.

• Daniel Lemire ☛ Faster JSON parsing with SVE2 on ARM processors

  ARM processors, like those in your phone, have instructions capable of processing several elements at once (SIMD). These instructions are called NEON. But many newer processors have a different SIMD extension called SVE.

• Ian Erik Varatalu ☛ Labeled matches: why is this not in every regex engine?

  The state machine is a way to pay the expensive part up front, such that execution is extremely fast. What I like about this the most is that it barely differs from the way RE# normally works, we get SIMD acceleration, simplifications and everything else to these methods as well, for free. It's like it was always meant to be.

  Algebraically the label is a glorified empty string, a marker at the end of each member that changes nothing about the union, but survives into the derivatives and ends up as metadata on whichever states accept. the code is there if you're curious.

• FOSS Force ☛ What’s Wrong with Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub ?

  GNU Project founder Richard Stallman and developer Jacob Bachmeyer argue that Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub’s licensing guidance, nonfree JavaScript, Hey Hi (AI) services, and centralized workflows undermine software freedom.