news
Programming Leftovers
-
Earthly ☛ Three Ways to Do Developer Experience (DX)
Field testing is observing developers using your tools, libraries, APIs, or frameworks in their natural working environment. You want to see how they handle real-world scenarios, what problems they hit, and how they get around them.
-
[Repeat] Ted Unangst ☛ OpenZFS Bug Ported to C
There was an (almost) catastrophic OpenZFS bug. If they had used zig, the bug would be easily detected. But the question remains, could we detect this bug in C?
To review, here’s the code with the bug. Can you spot it?
-
OMG Ubuntu ☛ Kiro, Amazon-Backed Agentic IDE, Enters Public Preview [Ed: Seems like hype and slop, not much to see here except another proprietary IDE]
Kiro, a new AI-powered IDE for Linux, macOS, and Windows, is now in public preview. Learn about its "spec-driven" workflow and VS Code compatibility.
-
R / R-Script
-
Rlang ☛ R Package Quality: Maintainer Criteria
At last we come to the final post! Over the previous four posts, we considered all aspects of how we validate package. As we’ve constantly repeated, most individual scores aren’t that important. Instead, it’s the cumulative effect that’s important; it gives us a hint of where to spend our energy.
This final post, considers the package’s maintenance aspects, including update frequency and bug management. The general idea is that around this component is to understand if bugs are addressed in a clear, quick and transparent method. Some of the scores are subjective, for example scoring the bug closure rate. However, as this is combined with multiple scores, tinkering with any particular score has limited effect.
-
Rlang ☛ Benchmarking memory usage in R
Profiling memory in R has never been a trivial task.
In this post, I would like to emphasize that currently popular methods are quite inaccurate and should therefore be used with caution. More importantly, they should not be used for drawing conclusions about the actual memory usage of R functions.
The root cause of the inaccuracy with many memory profiling tools in R is that they measure memory allocated by R (including R’s C code). They do not take into account memory allocated using C.
-