Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jul 24, 2025

• Tommy Palmer ☛ Accessibility and friction

  Have you tested it in multiple browsers? Multiple devices? Multiple operating systems?

• Google ☛ Google Online Security Blog: Introducing OSS Rebuild: Open Source, Rebuilt to Last

  Today we're excited to announce OSS Rebuild, a new project to strengthen trust in open source package ecosystems by reproducing upstream artifacts. As supply chain attacks continue to target widely-used dependencies, OSS Rebuild gives security teams powerful data to avoid compromise without burden on upstream maintainers.

• Sandor Dargo ☛ Format your own type (Part 1)

  I recently published two posts about how C++26 improves std::format and the related facilities. (If you missed them, here are Part 1 and Part 2https://www.sandordargo.com/blog/2025/07/16/cpp26-format-part-2) Now it’s time to explore how you can format your own types using std::format.

  But let’s start from the beginning.

• Jussi Pakkanen ☛ Comparing a red-black tree to a B-tree

  In an earlier blog post we found that optimizing the memory layout of a red-black tree does not seem to work. A different way of implementing an ordered container is to use a B-tree. It was originally designed to be used for on-disk data. The design principle was that memory access is "instant" while disk access is slow. Nowadays this applies to memory access as well, as cache hits are "instant" and uncached memory is slow.

• Henrique Dias ☛ Building Software For Fun

  They remind me of the time I made a few experiments for fun. I should do that kind of programming again: fun programming. I have some of those linked in my more page. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be web programming either. Just fun, with fun things.

• Zig ☛ New Aarch64 Backend

  Jacob made some pretty neat architectural decisions with this one. For instance, it uses the actual machine code instruction encoding for the compiler’s internal MIR structure. This means that instruction encoding is done on the N codegen threads instead of the 1 linker thread.

• R

  • Rlang ☛ rOpenSci News Digest, July 2025

    Dear rOpenSci friends, it’s time for our monthly news roundup! You can read this post on our blog. Now let’s dive into the activity at and around rOpenSci!

  • Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: qlcal 0.0.16 on CRAN: Regular Update

    qlcal delivers the calendaring parts of QuantLib. It is provided (for the R package) as a set of included files, so the package is self-contained and does not depend on an external QuantLib library (which can be demanding to build). qlcal covers over sixty country / market calendars and can compute holiday lists, its complement (i.e. business day lists) and much more. Examples are in the README at the repository, the package page, and course at the CRAN package page.

• Python

  • SparkFun Electronics ☛ MicroPython for Beginners

    Our goal in this tutorial is to help you set up and use MicroPython tailored for microcontrollers (MCUs) and Linux devices. Thanks to its more direct method of coding, MicroPython makes programming embedded systems more accessible and enjoyable than ever. We'll walk you through the entire process, from flashing the firmware to running lines of code.

• Perl

  • Perl ☛ Proxmox Donates €10,000 to The Perl and Raku Foundation

    The Perl and Raku Foundation (TPRF) is delighted to announce a generous €10,000 donation from Proxmox Server Solutions GmbH, supporting the critical Perl 5 Core Maintenance Fund. Corporate partnerships play a critical role in enabling TPRF to fulfill its mission.

  • Shadowcat Systems Ltd ☛ “Ripples They Cause in the World” – Shadowcat Systems Limited

    It is with great sadness that we announce the passing of Shadowcat co-founder, Matt S. Trout. Matt started Shadowcat Systems with Mark Keating in 2005 after a few years of each of them working for other people’s profit. In recent years Matt had taken a sabbatical from work and from his online community projects due to a battle with health. Matt was just 42 years old.

• Java

  • [Old] The University of Chicago ☛ Was Microsoft's "Polluted Java" a presumptively legal improved product design? - ProMarket

    A representative example of the changes Microsoft made is the addition of “extensions” to overcome Java’s inherently cross-platform construction. Specifically, Microsoft “developed methods for enabling ‘calls’ to ‘native’ Windows code that made porting more difficult than the method Sun was striving to make standard.” Although “Microsoft easily could have implemented Sun’s native method along with its own in its developer tools and its [version of Java]… it elected instead to implement only the Microsoft methods.” Microsoft implemented this design because it denied developers a choice “between speed and portability.” And, “Microsoft encouraged developers to use these extensions by shipping its developer tools with the extensions enabled by default and by failing to warn developers” that the tools in their default mode would produce applications that run only on Windows and Microsoft’s version of Java.

  • [Old] CNET ☛ Sun, Microsoft settle Java suit

    Though Microsoft may clone Java, it won't be allowed to say its products are Java-compatible.