Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on May 01, 2026

• Daniel Stenberg ☛ Approaching zero bugs?

  The more bugs we fix, the fewer bugs remain in the code. Assuming the developers manage to fix problems at a decent enough pace.

  For every bugfix we merge, there is a risk that the change itself introduces one more more new separate problems. We also tend to keep adding features and changing behavior as we want to improve our products, and when doing so we occasionally slip up and introduce new problems as well.

• Oskar Wickström ☛ The Bombadil Terminal Experiment

  With these two in place, I built a very basic fuzzer for TUIs: it runs the command you give it, polls its output, and writes interleaved random input sequences (printable ASCII characters and ANSI escape sequences). It also scrolls and resizes the terminal occasionally. Timing is a bit tricky, but it seems the current approach works fine: polling reads until the terminal is idle, capture state, then apply new inputs. Regarding speed, it depends a lot on the program being tested, but it looks capable of capturing at least 300 states per second.

• Eli Bendersky ☛ Thoughts on WebAssembly as a stack machine

  This week the article Wasm is not quite a stack machine has been making the rounds and has caught my eye. The post claims that WASM is not a pure stack machine because it has locals and is missing some stack manipulation operations like dup and swap.

• GCC ☛ GCC 16 Release Series — Changes, New Features, and Fixes - GNU Project

  This page is a "brief" summary of some of the huge number of improvements in GCC 16. You may also want to check out our Porting to GCC 16 page and the full GCC documentation.

• Donnacha Oisín Kidney ☛ Tries for Polynomials

  One of my favourite Haskell papers is McIlroy’s wonderful “Power Series, Power Serious” (1999). The paper is about power series, which are a type of infinite sums that behave like (infinite) polynomials. For example, cos can be represented by the following power series: [...]

• Rust Blog ☛ The Rust Programming Language Blog: Announcing Surveillance Giant Google Summer of Code 2026 selected projects

  As previously announced, the Rust Project is participating in Google Summer of Code (GSoC) 2026. GSoC is a global program organized by Surveillance Giant Google that is designed to bring new contributors to the world of open source.

• Rust Blog ☛ The Rust Programming Language Blog: Raising the baseline for the `nvptx64-nvidia-cuda` target

  The nvptx64-nvidia-cuda target is a compilation target for NVIDIA GPUs. When using this target, the final output is PTX. Two version choices shape that output: [...]

• GCC ☛ Porting to GCC 16 - GNU Project

  The GCC 16 release series differs from previous GCC releases in a number of ways. Some of these are a result of bug fixing, and some old behaviors have been intentionally changed to support new standards, or relaxed in standards-conforming ways to facilitate compilation or run-time performance.

  Some of these changes are user visible and can cause grief when porting to GCC 16. This document is an effort to identify common issues and provide solutions. Let us know if you have suggestions for improvements!

• Perl / Raku

  • Arne Sommer ☛ Missing Equilibrium with Raku

    This is my response to The Weekly Challenge #371.

• Python

  • Paolo Melchiorre ☛ PyCon Italia 2026

    GeneratedField brings database-generated columns to Django, but when should you use it? This talk explains GeneratedField by example, with practical patterns, trade-offs, and an overview of how it evolved from Django 5.0 to 6.0 for real production use.

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • [Old] Ham Vocke ☛ A Quick and Easy Guide to tmux

    I love working with the command line. I think there’s hardly any more productive and versatile tool for a software developer than the terminal. The additional hacker/wizard/neckbeard kind of feeling you get when using a terminal comes for free, what’s not to love?

    Over the years I’ve tried to streamline and customize my command line experience to be more convenient, more fun to use or just to look rad. One of the most important tools to drive my daily command line experience is tmux. Check this out: [...]

• Java/Golang

  • Leon Mika ☛ Could Swift's Guard Statement Work in Go?

    While writing yet another if block to check whether a map had a value, I asked myself a question: could Swift’s guard statement work in Go?

    Go is such an if heavy language. You’re adding if statements pretty much everywhere: after you receive an error, after you do a type assertion, when you want to verify that a map has a value. All of these come to you in the form of tuples, with the last one being the value to switch on: [...]

• R / R-Script

  • Rlang ☛ Understanding R’s `describe()` Function: A Complete Guide to Summary Statistics

    The describe() function from R’s psych package (Revelle, 2023) provides a comprehensive statistical summary of your dataset. Unlike R’s base summary() function, it includes additional metrics that are particularly useful for data exploration and assumption checking.