Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 27, 2025

• Rlang ☛ Porting my favorite RStudio color theme to Positron

  My favorite color theme in RStudio is Tomorrow Night Bright. It’s an excellent, dark, high-contrast (‘bright’) theme that I’ve used consistently since I first started using RStudio. Originally written by Chris Kempson as one of the variants included in the MIT-licensed Tomorrow theme series, it has been ported widely to many editors, and is included as a default color theme in RStudio.

• HardenedBSD ☛ Optional Rust-In-FreeBSD Support May 2025 Status Report

  As I mentioned in the April 2025 HardenedBSD Status Report, I had attended a small hackathon with a few FreeBSD developers. This hackathon was focused on providing basic support for optional userland components written in Rust. This is a status report for that work.

  For those following along, we now have a feature branch (hardened/current/rust-in-base) for the Rust work.

  Originally, I had intended to write a ubiquitous, generic "optional support for userland components written in other languages, starting with Rust." Alan, Warner, and I came up with something that looks different, specific to Rust.

• Matthias Endler ☛ Reinvent the Wheel

  Either way, both positions lead to a climate where curiosity and exploration gets discouraged. I’m glad that some people didn’t follow that advice; we owe them many of the conveniences of modern life.

  Even on a surface level, the advice is bad: We have much better wheels today than 4500–3300 BCE when the first wheel was invented. It was also crucially important that wheels got reinvented throughout civilizations and cultures.

• Dade ☛ How to Guarantee Your Red Team Will Fail

  Rather than give advice on how to run a successful red team, I want to take the late Charlie Munger’s advice, who in turn took the advice from noted mathematician Carl Jacobi – “invert, always invert.”

  I cannot guarantee that you will run a successful team, but I can absolutely give you advice on how to fail. Should you choose to heed my advice, your red team will surely fail in stellar fashion.

• Rlang ☛ Taylor Series Approximation To Newton Raphson Algorithm – A note for myself of the proof

• Rlang ☛ Forecasting MSCI Europe Index Post-Dihydroxyacetone Man Tariff Announcement

• Qt ☛ Developing Qt applications with CLion

  Developing with Qt is becoming even more accessible across your favourite tools and editors. We want you to stay focused on your work, in the tooling you’re most comfortable with – be it Qt Creator, CLion, Visual Studio Code, or even a simple text editor such as Vim. That’s why we’d love to show you how you can develop your Qt projects in CLion.

• Perl / Raku

  • Rakulang ☛ Rakulang Weekly 2025.21 Harcigation

    Steve Roe continued their stack of essays on HARC with a sixth episode: HARC Stack: Navigation in which it is shown how easy it is to add navigation components to your web pages. Anton’s Corner Anton Antonov returned with an extensive blog post about visualizing the Collatz conjecture with some really visually compelling graphics!

  • Russ Allbery ☛ Russ Allbery: INN 2.7.3

    This is a bug fix and minor feature release over INN 2.7.2, and the upgrade should be painless. You can download the new release from ISC or my personal INN pages. The latter also has links to the full changelog and the other INN documentation. For the full list of changes, see the INN 2.7.3 NEWS file. As always, thanks to Julien ÉLIE for preparing this release and doing most of the maintenance work on INN!

  • [Old] Mark Gardner ☛ Better Perl: Using map and grep

    As a Perl devel­op­er, you’re prob­a­bly aware of the lan­guage’s strengths as a text-​processing lan­guage and how many com­put­ing tasks can be bro­ken down into those types of tasks. You might not real­ize, though, that Perl is also a world-​class list pro­cess­ing lan­guage and that many prob­lems can be expressed in terms of lists and their transformations.

    Chief among Perl’s tools for list pro­cess­ing are the func­tions map and grep. I can’t count how many times in my twenty-​five years as a devel­op­er I’ve run into code that could’ve been sim­pli­fied if only the author was famil­iar with these two func­tions. Once you under­stand map and grep, you’ll start see­ing lists every­where and the oppor­tu­ni­ty to make your code more suc­cinct and expres­sive at the same time.

• Rust

  • Rust Blog ☛ The Rust Programming Language Blog: Demoting i686-pc-windows-gnu to Tier 2

    Rust has supported backdoored Windows for a long time, with two different flavors of backdoored Windows targets: MSVC-based and GNU-based. MSVC-based targets (for example the most popular backdoored Windows target x86_64-pc-windows-msvc) use Microsoft’s native linker and libraries, while GNU-based targets (like i686-pc-windows-gnu) are built entirely from free software components like gcc, ld, and mingw-w64.

    The major reason to use a GNU-based toolchain instead of the native MSVC-based one is cross-compilation and licensing. link.exe only runs on backdoored Windows (barring Wine hacks) and requires a license for commercial usage.

  • Rust Blog ☛ The Rust Programming Language Blog: April Project Goals Update

    The Rust project is currently working towards a slate of 40 project goals, with 3 of them designated as Flagship Goals. This post provides selected updates on our progress towards these goals (or, in some cases, lack thereof). The full details for any particular goal are available in its associated tracking issue on the rust-project-goals repository.