Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 02, 2026

• Undeadly ☛ Game of Trees 0.121 released

  Version 0.121 of Game of Trees has been released (and the port updated): [...]

• Aman Mittal ☛ TIL about git shortlog

  I have been using Git for all my career in the tech. I am habitual of the basic commands such as git add, commit, status, log and a few more that I use consistently. Yes, until last week, I had never once used or heard about git shortlog.

  Sometimes you want to know who actually did the stuff inside a repository. Or like me, at the end of each year at work, I have to compile a list of external contributors along with their contributions count.

• MaskRay ☛ lld 22 ELF changes

  For those unfamiliar, lld is the LLVM linker, supporting PE/COFF, ELF, Mach-O, and WebAssembly ports. These object file formats differ significantly, and each port must follow the conventions of the platform's system linker. As a result, the ports share limited code (diagnostics, memory allocation, etc) and have largely separate reviewer groups.

  With LLVM 22.1 releasing soon, I've added some notes to the https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/blob/release/22.x/lld/docs/ReleaseNotes.rst as an lld/ELF maintainer. As usual, I've reviewed almost all the patches not authored by me.

• Uwe Friedrichsen ☛ Forget technical debt

  If we ponder this question, we quickly realize that technical debt is about cognitive load. Technical debt increases the cognitive load of a software engineer. The more technical debt a system contains, the harder the code becomes to understand, and the more different concepts, hacks, and alike engineers must keep in their heads whenever they try to implement a change or add something new. In other words: increased cognitive load.

  However, cognitive load is not the end of the line. Reducing the cognitive load of an engineer is not an end in itself. If we ponder why reducing cognitive load is desirable, we end up with two primary goals we try to support by reducing cognitive load: [...]

• Daniel Lemire ☛ Converting floats to strings quickly

  The results vary quite a bit depending on the numbers being converted. But we find that the two implementations tend to do best: Dragonbox by Jeon and Schubfach by Giulietti. The Ryū implementation by Adams is close behind or just as fast. All of these techniques are about 10 times faster than the original Dragon 4 from 1990. A tenfold performance gain in performance over three decades is equivalent to a gain of about 8% per year, entirely due to better implementations and algorithms.

• Lorin Hochstein ☛ Ashby taught us we have to fight fire with fire – Surfing Complexity

  There’s an old saying in software engineering, originally attributed to David Wheeler: We can solve any problem by introducing an extra level of indirection. The problem is that indirection adds complexity to a system. Just ask anybody who is learning C and is wrestling the concept of pointers. Or ask someone who is operating an unfamiliar codebase and is trying to use grep to find the code that relates to certain log messages. Indirection is a powerful tool, but it also renders systems more difficult to reason about.

  The old saying points at a more general phenomenon: our engineering solutions to problems invariably add complexity.

• Python

  • Vikash Patel ☛ Building Production-Ready Background Workers in Python

    Your background jobs crash on deployment, fail silently, and corrupt data. Here's how to fix it with worker pools, retry strategies, idempotency, and graceful shutdown. A guide to building production background processing systems that don't break under load. Tested at 20 req/sec.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • Tomasz Wisniewski ☛ Shell quick tips: Bash incognito mode

    This creates a new shell session which maintains a ‘runtime’ history so, it’s possible to navigate around but nothing is saved to .bash_history (or whatever other file you’re using for that purpose).

  • HowTo Geek ☛ This Bash redirection trick replaces echo ... | command

    Bash—and other Linux shells—support powerful command plumbing using features like redirection. You may be used to the most basic type of input redirection but, as is often the case, Linux has more depth than meets the eye.