Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 24, 2025

• Filippo Valsorda ☛ The Geomys Standard of Care

  One of the most impactful effects of professionalizing open source maintenance is that as professionals we can invest into upholding a set of standards that make our projects safer and more reliable. The same commitments and overhead that are often objected to when required of volunteers should be table stakes for professional maintainers.

• Michael Kohl ☛ Module Functors in OCaml

  Since functional programming’s move into the mainstream, many developers have embraced concepts like higher-order functions. OCaml take this a step further and extends the concept to the module level. This article explores module functors, a powerful feature that offers a functional approach to code sharing, dependency injection, and more.

• Andy Bell ☛ NaN, the not-a-number number that isn’t NaN

  When NaN is included in a arithmetic expression, the result will always be NaN — that tracks, right? Anything math’d against the very concept of “not a number” can’t result in a number: [...]

• Steinar H Gunderson ☛ Steinar H. Gunderson: Modern perfect hashing

  Wojciech Muła posted about modern perfect hashing for strings and I wanted to make some comments about my own implementation (that sadly never got productionized because doubling the speed compared to gperf wasn't really that impactful in the end).

• Ruby ☛ Ruby 3.3.10 Released

  Ruby 3.3.10 has been released.

  along with other bug fixes. Please refer to the release notes on Microsoft's proprietary prison GitHub for further details.

• KDAB ☛ Understanding Type-Based Alias Analysis in C and C++

  Type systems do more than just catch errors - they guide compiler optimizations too. This post explores type-based alias analysis in C and C++, showing how aliasing affects performance, why undefined behavior matters, and how the restrict keyword helps unlock faster code.

• NAP, free visual and media framework, now dazzles anywhere

  With deeper support for Linux and high-DPI rendering, NAP, the expressive, low-latency, efficient framework for control and visuals, can now awe audiences anywhere. Visualization, sound, running electronics, whatever it is you want to throw at NAP, now you can do it better on Windows and Linux, including embedded platforms. And did we mention it’s free and open source?

• Perl / Raku

  • Arne Sommer ☛ Form Formation with Raku

    You are given an array of integers, @ints and an integer, $x.

    Write a script to add $x to the integer in the array-form.

• R / R-Script

  • Bruno Rodrigues ☛ Orchestrating Polyglot, Reproducible Data Science with Nix and {rixpress}

    TL;DR: {rixpress} lets you build multi-language data pipelines (R, Python, Julia) where each step runs in its own reproducible environment. Uses Nix under the hood. Now on CRAN, and there’s even a Python port on PyPI!

• Java/Golang

  • Redowan Delowar ☛ Avoiding collisions in Go context keys

    Along with propagating deadlines and cancellation signals, Go’s context package can also carry request-scoped values across API boundaries and processes.

    There are only two public API constructs associated with context values: [...]

  • David Gerrells ☛ how fast is java? Teaching an old dog new tricks

    Java, the language everyone loves to hate. Long has it garnered the reputation of a stagnant, obtuse, bloated beast only used by those who have no other choice because some enterprise corporate believed the hype train of the 90s. But is that all still true today? Has java calcified in its unchanging object forward ways destined to fall into the well of has beens? Or, has the old dog learned some new tricks?

    The challenge: Use every new trick in the “book of Java” to simulate as many particles as possible, cpu only and maybe, just maybe, beat rust?