Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Mar 06, 2026

• Mark-Jason Dominus ☛ Documentation is a message in a bottle

  Something interesting happened at work this week. Our company is going to a convention later this month, and they will have a booth with big TV screens showing statistics that update in real time. My job is to write the backend server that delivers the statistics.

  I read over the documents that the product people had written up about what was wanted, asked questions, got answers, and then turned the original two-line ticket into a three-page ticket that said what should be done and how. I intended to do the ticket myself, but it's good practice to write all this stuff down, for many reasons: [...]

• Sergio Visinoni ☛ Building and launching a product in one month. Worth it?

  Today’s article is the story of a giant rabbit hole, or how a rather simple need turned into a month-long quest, adventure, time drain, or massive waste.

  The jury is still out to evaluate the results, but nevertheless I’m here to share the story with you, my beloved readers.

  This is the story of Rushomon, something you didn’t know existed until about 5 seconds ago. Its existence is unlikely to change your life, but the story of its making might.

  But let’s go back to about a month ago, on February 1st.

• Andrew Nesbitt ☛ Package Manager Magic Files

  A follow-up to my post on git’s magic files. Most package managers have a manifest and a lockfile, and most developers stop there. But across the ecosystems I track on ecosyste.ms, package managers check for dozens of other files beyond the manifest and lockfile, controlling where packages come from, what gets published, how versions resolve, and what code runs during installation. These files tend to be poorly documented, inconsistently named, and useful once you know they exist.

• Dirk Eddelbuettel ☛ Dirk Eddelbuettel: RcppGSL 0.3.14 on CRAN: Maintenance

  A new release 0.3.14 of RcppGSL is now on CRAN. The RcppGSL package provides an interface from R to the GNU GSL by relying on the Rcpp package. It has already been uploaded to Debian, and is also already available as a binary via r2u.

• Ben Werdmuller ☛ The Safety Levers

  Modeling uncertainty, learning, and humility allows everyone to be in growth mode vs approaching their work with a fixed mindset. But it has to be done with intention: uncertainty that doesn’t also come with norms around experimentation, feedback, and accountability just feels like instability.

• LWN ☛ Buildroot 2026.02 released

  Peter Korsgaard has announced version 2026.02 of Buildroot, a tool for generating embedded GNU/Linux systems through cross-compilation. Notable changes include added support for HPPA, use of the 6.19.x kernel headers by default, better SBOM generation, and more.

• Qt

  • KDAB ☛ Weighing up Zngur and CXX for Rust/C++ Interop

    A detailed comparison of Zngur and CXX for Rust/C++ interoperability, exploring their design philosophies, container support, trait objects, async capabilities, build systems, and real-world tradeoffs.

  • Qt ☛ Accelerated 2D Canvas Benchmarks

    The previous parts of this trilogy have introduced Qt Canvas Painter and its novel new features. This post will focus on the accelerated 2D canvas performance aspect, demonstrating how our holistic approach to performance can be shown in benchmarks.

  • Qt ☛ What's new in QML Tooling in 6.11, part 1: QML Language Server (qmlls)

    The latest Qt release, Qt 6.11, is just around the corner. This short blog post series presents the new features that QML tooling brings in Qt 6.11, starting with qmlls in this part 1.

• Python

  • Eric Matthes ☛ What is `self`?

    MP 162: It's been answered many times, but it's always worth revisiting.

    I've been reflecting on classes lately, and how we teach them. One of the questions that comes up in every discussion about OOP with people who are seeing it for the first time in Python is this: [...]

• Java/Golang

  • Redowan Delowar ☛ Mutate your locked state inside a closure

    When multiple goroutines need to read and write the same value, you need a mutex to make sure they don’t step on each other. Without one, concurrent writes can corrupt the state - two goroutines might read the same value, both modify it, and one silently overwrites the other’s change. The usual approach is to put a sync.Mutex next to the fields it protects: [...]

• Rust

  • Rust Weekly Updates ☛ This Week In Rust: This Week in Rust 641

    Hello and welcome to another issue of This Week in Rust!

  • Rust Blog ☛ The Rust Programming Language Blog: Announcing Rust 1.94.0

    The Rust team is happy to announce a new version of Rust, 1.94.0. Rust is a programming language empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.

    If you have a previous version of Rust installed via rustup, you can get 1.94.0 with:

    If you don't have it already, you can get rustup from the appropriate page on our website, and check out the detailed release notes for 1.94.0.

  • LWN ☛ Rust 1.94.0 released

    Version

    1.94.0 of the Rust language has been released. Changes include array

    windows (an iterator for slices), some Cargo enhancements, and a number

    of newly stabilized APIs.