Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Aug 19, 2022

• RcppArmadillo 0.11.2.3.1 on CRAN: Double Update

  Armadillo is a powerful and expressive C++ template library for linear algebra and scientific computing. It aims towards a good balance between speed and ease of use, has a syntax deliberately close to Matlab, and is useful for algorithm development directly in C++, or quick conversion of research code into production environments. RcppArmadillo integrates this library with the R environment and language–and is widely used by (currently) 1005 packages other packages on CRAN (as celebrated in this blog post on passing 1000 packages from just four days ago), downloaded nearly 26 million times (per the partial logs from the cloud mirrors of CRAN), and the CSDA paper (preprint / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 488 times according to Google Scholar.

  This release brings together two distinct changes. First, it updates the relese from upstream 11.2.0 (and CRAN 0.11.2.0.0 released a few weeks ago) to the now current 11.2.3 release by Conrard (given that more than four weeks have passed so that we do not surpass CRAN’s desired cadence of ‘releases no more than once a month’). The changeset includes a few small refinements (see below), it also includedes a deprecation for initialization for which I will need to reach out to a few packages for whom this triggers a deprecation warning. And speaking of deprecation, the other reason for this release is the desire by the Matrix package to phase out a few older conversions (or casts in C/C++ lingo) which we accomodated.

• just-in-time code generation within webassembly

  Just-in-time (JIT) code generation is an important tactic when implementing a programming language. Generating code at run-time allows a program to specialize itself against the specific data it is run against. For a program that implements a programming language, that specialization is with respect to the program being run, and possibly with respect to the data that program uses.

  The way this typically works is that the program generates bytes for the instruction set of the machine it's running on, and then transfers control to those instructions.

  Usually the program has to put its generated code in memory that is specially marked as executable. However, this capability is missing in WebAssembly. How, then, to do just-in-time compilation in WebAssembly?

• SQL: The Universal Solvent for REST APIs – O’Reilly

  Data scientists working in Python or R typically acquire data by way of REST APIs. Both environments provide libraries that help you make HTTP calls to REST endpoints, then transform JSON responses into dataframes. But that’s never as simple as we’d like. When you’re reading a lot of data from a REST API, you need to do it a page at a time, but pagination works differently from one API to the next. So does unpacking the resulting JSON structures. HTTP and JSON are low-level standards, and REST is a loosely-defined framework, but nothing guarantees absolute simplicity, never mind consistency across APIs.

  What if there were a way of reading from APIs that abstracted all the low-level grunt work and worked the same way everywhere? Good news! That is exactly what Steampipe does. It’s a tool that translates REST API calls directly into SQL tables. Here are three examples of questions that you can ask and answer using Steampipe.

• Defeating definedness | Playing Perl 6␛b6xA Raku

  In his latest blogpost, p6steve went through a lot of trouble to enforce definedness. I managed to shorten it a bit.

• Static Site Generators Are Easy to Use…Right?

  I’ve had this post in my drafts folder for months now Actually, it’s ever since I realised how hard it is to manage content with Static Site Generators, and flipped back to WordPress.

• Niko Matsakis: Come contribute to Salsa 2022!

  Have you heard of the Salsa project? Salsa is a library for incremental computation – it’s used by rust-analyzer, for example, to stay responsive as you type into your IDE (we have also discussed using it in rustc, though more work is needed there). We are in the midst of a big push right now to develop and release Salsa 2022, a major new revision to the API that will make Salsa far more natural to use. I’m writing this blog post both to advertise that ongoing work and to put out a call for contribution. Salsa doesn’t yet have a large group of maintainers, and I would like to fix that. If you’ve been looking for an open source project to try and get involved in, maybe take a look at our Salsa 2022 tracking issue and see if there is an issue you’d like to tackle?

• Ignacy Kuchciński: GSoC 2022: Fourth update - Code

  I published my last blog post about the design phase of my GSoC project on 17 July. It's been a month, and it's been far from uneventful. I'm going to talk about the first prototype and my short presentation at GUADEC, as well as the review from designers and the result of it - the new mockup and the second prototype.