news
Programming Leftovers
-
Terence Eden ☛ Vertically Aligning Roman Numerals in Code
I'm obsessed with vertically aligning my code. So how to solve this ugly problem?
The answer was simple. Assign keys to the values and then flip the array!
-
Alisa Sireneva ☛ You might misunderstand arithmetic coding
I’ve written an arithmetic coder, like, three times in my life, so the mistake I want to highlight is likely amateurish. But since I didn’t have a clue that my understanding was incomplete, I figured I needed to write a post about it.
-
Alisa Sireneva ☛ This Wasm interpreter fits in a QR code
The interpreter implements the entire Lime1 Wasm feature set, and a chunk of WASI sufficient for these programs. It’s not quite feature-complete, it’s slow, and it’s insecure – but it’s still a marvelous feat of engineering with reasonable capabilities.
I had insane fun working on it, and now I want to share what made this possible.
-
Evan Hahn ☛ png-cmp: like cmp for PNGs
png-cmp is a program I built that checks if two PNGs are visually equivalent. It’s inspired by the
cmpcommand. Here’s how you use it: [...] -
Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh
-
Rui Carmo ☛ rootshell
The Ghostty bit matters because it means the rendering is fast, the font handling is good (it has Fira Code Nerd which has become by default), and the whole thing feels like a proper terminal rather than the usual iOS compromise. There’s also a built-in AI assistant that can execute shell commands locally, which sounds gimmicky but is surprisingly useful for one-off tasks when you can’t be bothered to type out a long find or awk invocation on a phone keyboard (I got it to work with a Gemini API key).
-
-
Rust
-
Jelmer Vernooij ☛ Jelmer Vernooij: Inquest, a test result repository in Rust
testrepository
For a long time I’ve used Robert Collins’ testrepository (testr) to run tests in many of the projects I work on. It’s a small, focused tool built around a simple idea: decouple the running of tests from the recording and querying of their results.
-