Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 10, 2025

• Sven Hoexter: Backstage Render Markdown in a Collapsible Block

  Brief note to maybe spare someone else the trouble. If you want to hide e.g. a huge table in Backstage (techdocs/mkdocs) behind a collapsible element you need the md_in_html extension and use the markdown attribute for it to kick in on the <details> html tag.

• Julia Language Blog Aggregator ☛ Discover the Key Features and Updates in Julia 1.12

  This release is a minor release,meaning it includes language enhancementsand bug fixesbut should also be fully compatiblewith code written in previous Julia versions(from version 1.0 and onward).

  In this post,we will check out some of the features and improvementsintroduced in this newest Julia version.Read the full post,or click on the links belowto jump to the features that interest you.

• CME Group Inc ☛ Why we didn't rewrite our feed handler in Rust

  We recently faced an interesting decision: what language should we use to rewrite our market data feed handler? Despite Rust's growing popularity in fintech and our own successful use of it in other systems, we chose C++. This post explores the technical reasoning behind that choice, diving into specific patterns where Rust's strict ownership model created friction for our use case.

• Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: xptr 1.2.0 on CRAN: New(ly Adopted) Package!

  Excited to share that xptr is back on CRAN! The xptr package helps to create, check, modify, use, share, … external pointer

  External pointers are used quite extensively throughout R to manage external ‘resources’ such as datanbase connection objects and alike, and can be very useful to pass pointers to just about any C / C++ data structure around. While described in Writing R Extensions (notably Section 5.13), they can be a little bare-bones—and so this package can be useful. It had been created by Randy Lai and maintained by him during 2017 to 2020, but then fell off CRAN. In work with nanoarrow and its clean and minimal Arrow interface xptr came in handy so I adopted it.

• Python

  • Ubuntu Handbook ☛ Python 3.14 Released with Free-threading & Template string literals

    Python announced the new 3.14 version yesterday! See what’s new and how to install guide for Ubuntu users. Python 3.14 is the latest stable release of the Python programming language, with 5 years support until 2030. Since the release, the free-threaded build of Python is officially supported and no longer experimental.

  • Simon Willison ☛ TIL: Testing different Python versions with uv with-editable and uv-test

    While tinkering with upgrading various projects to handle Python 3.14 I finally figured out a universal uv recipe for running the tests for the current project in any specified version of Python: [...]

  • Simon Willison ☛ Python 3.14 Is Here. How Fast Is It?

    Python 3.14 Is Here. How Fast Is It? (via) Miguel Grinberg uses some basic benchmarks (like fib(40)) to test the new Python 3.14 on Linux and macOS and finds some substantial speedups over Python 3.13 - around 27% faster.

• Java/Golang

  • Redowan Delowar ☛ Organizing Go tests

    When it comes to test organization, Go’s standard testing library only gives you a few options. I think that’s a great thing because there are fewer details to remember and fewer things to onboard people to. However, during code reviews, I often see people contravene a few common conventions around test organization, especially those who are new to the language.