Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 19, 2025

• Santo Pfingsten ☛ Stop Using and Recommending React

  I have used React for a long time. Trust me when I tell you: There is no reason to use it and a lot of reasons against it. This is going to be a long explanation, but bear with me!

• Dan Snow ☛ Comparing 500 billion rows with data.table

  So, that’s the test data, but what about the original problem with 500 billion rows? Can the data.table solution actually finish running it?

  Yes it can! Though with some caveats: [...]

• Sergio Talens-Oliag: Using actions to build this site

  As promised on my previous post on this entry I’ll explain how I’ve set up forgejo actions on the source repository of this site to build it using a runner instead of doing it on the public server using a webhook to trigger the operation.

• Chris ☛ Using Emacs More

• ID Root ☛ How To Enable PHP Error Reporting

  PHP error reporting is a crucial aspect of web development that helps developers identify and fix issues in their code. When properly configured, it provides valuable insights into what’s going wrong with your PHP scripts, making the debugging process more efficient.

• Peter 'CzP' Czanik ☛ Introducing the develop branch of the syslog-ng git repo

  For many years, the development of syslog-ng happened on the master branch in Git. However, if you follow that branch, you might have noticed that there has not been much activity on it lately. That is because we introduced a new branch in git called “develop”.

• Buttondown LLC ☛ Verification-First Development

  A while back I argued on the Blue Site¹ that "test-first development" (TFD) was different than "test-driven development" (TDD). The former is "write tests before you write code", the latter is a paradigm, culture, and collection of norms that's based on TFD. More broadly, TFD is a special case of Verification-First Development and TDD is not.

  VFD: before writing code, put in place some means of verifying that the code is correct, or at least have an idea of what you'll do.

• Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppArmadillo 14.4.0-1 on CRAN: New Upstream

  widely used by (currently) 1234 other packages on CRAN, downloaded 38.8 million / vignette) by Conrad and myself has been cited 617 times according minor version 14.4.0 last month. That was preceding by several extensive rounds of reverse-dependency checks covering the 1200+ packages at CRAN. We eventually narrowed the impact down to just eight packages, and I opened issue #462 to manage the transition along with ‘GitHub-only’ release 14.4.0-0 of RcppArmadillo.

• Python

  • Linux Handbook ☛ Packaging a Python App to Executable .deb Binary

    I am sharing how I packaged my python application into an executable .deb package in this tutorial.

  • The New Stack ☛ From Basics to Best Practices: Python Regex Mastery

    Regex, short for regular expressions, is a powerful tool for matching and manipulating text. It automates various text-processing tasks, such as validating email addresses, extracting data from log files and cleaning messy datasets. While regex syntax is quite similar across programming languages, this tutorial will focus on how it works specifically in Python.

• Rust

  • Rust Blog ☛ The Rust Programming Language Blog: Announcing Rust 1.85.1

    Due to a bug in the implementation, combined doctests did not work as intended in the stable 2024 Edition. Internal errors with feature stability caused rustdoc to automatically use its "unmerged" fallback method instead, like in previous editions.

    Those errors are now fixed in 1.85.1, realizing the performance improvement of combined doctest compilation as intended! See the backport issue for more details, including the risk analysis of making this behavioral change in a point release.

  • Niko Matsakis: Rust in 2025: Language interop and the extensible compiler

    For many years, C has effectively been the “lingua franca” of the computing world. It’s pretty hard to combine code from two different programming languages in the same process–unless one of them is C. The same could theoretically be true for Rust, but in practice there are a number of obstacles that make that harder than it needs to be. Building out silky smooth language interop should be a core goal of helping Rust to target foundational applications. I think the right way to do this is not by extending rustc with knowledge of other programming languages but rather by building on Rust’s core premise of being an extensible language. By investing in building out an “extensible compiler” we can allow crate authors to create a plethora of ergonomic, efficient bridges between Rust and other languages.