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Programming Leftovers
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Sean Conner ☛ An HTML title from Ηελλ
I had some small changes to mod_blog queued up when I noticed my gopher feed had the following in it: [...]
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Mikael Zayenz Lagerkvist ☛ Planning with open variable lists in Gecode
Planning is a research field of its own, and a common first idea is to describe the problem in PDDL and hand it to one of the many planning systems that read it. For a lot of problems, that is the right choice. Constraint programming is another natural fit, especially when the actions come with restrictions like a battery that runs down. The common objection is that most constraint programming solvers fix the set of variables before search starts, so we need a bound on the length of the plan before we know how long it will be.
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Geir Isene ☛ A galaxy of repos – Geir's Everything
Every repo is a star. Its size comes from its lines of code, its colour from its language. Rust has one arm, assembly another, Ruby a third. The oldest repos sit by the core, the newest out at the tips.
A repo changed this week has spikes. A commit makes its star flare. Enter opens the repo in pointer, my file manager.
While I look at it, it sleeps. A key or a commit wakes it.
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Farid Zakaria ☛ A clock made of branches
In dafuq is a deterministic VM? I explained how the clock inside Rewind VM moves 5 microseconds per step. More specifically, that clock, exit time, moves only when the guest exits such as from a syscall. It treats everything the program does between two exits as instant. Therefore a program that is CPU bound such as doing nothing but math for a full second between two system calls, sees only 5µs go by. 🤦🏻♂️
Rewind has a second clock mode as well, counter time, that tries to account for the work. The clock advances one nanosecond for every conditional branch the guest retired.
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Collabora ☛ Sunscreen, a stylus, and 16 hours of pair programming with an AI
An AI-assisted side project turned a missing KDE tablet feature into a working handwriting mode, combining open source recognition, stylus input, and human-led debugging across an unfamiliar software stack.
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Daniel Lemire ☛ In C++, = default and {} are not the same constructor
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Modernes C++ GmbH ☛ The Problem with C++ Safety (Part 2): Modern C++ Is a Mindset, Not a Standard
In the first part of this article, we have taken a look at two attempts to decide whether a given string is a palindrome. Both implementations were written in “Classic C++” and didn’t feel great: the code was difficult to read, hard to understand and consequently the defects were difficult to detect. Now it’s time to continue the story and to take a look at a better solution, the “Modern C++” solution.
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Perl / Raku
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Perl ☛ This week in PSC (241) | 2026-11-02
All three of us discussed the recent issue GH24977 about how the behaviour of interpolation in regexp quotes changes under use strict in latest blead perl. We feel this is a change that needs more thinking and adjustment before it reaches a stable perl release.
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Python
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Will Munn ☛ We have lift off 🚀: building a gemini server in python
7 years after its invention, I discovered the Gemini protocol. It’s a kind of “back to first principals” alternative to the web, aimed at providing value to independent content creators away from the noise, bots and trackers of the main web.
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R / R-Script
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rOpenSci ☛ rOpenSci | Carolina Pradier, rOpenSci champion and mentor
We started this article as an interview series with Champions from our program, and we decided to publish for our 15th anniversary series. This is the interview with Carolina Pradier, main maintainer of the eph package.
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Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: myman 0.13.0 on CRAN: Another wave!
Another new version of our still-new-ish package myman reached CRAN this morning, and has been has also been updated. The package offers twenty two hundred eighty four
This release contains a new wave from October 31 to November 1 poking fun at Mike Johnson—just in time for the election.
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