news
Programming Leftovers
-
LWN ☛ Zig explores structured concurrency [LWN.net]
Version 0.16.0 of the Zig programming language was recently announced, and with it an expanded version of the new Io interface that we covered in December. The new interface is based on an idea called structured concurrency that makes writing correct concurrent applications easier. Zig's implementation of the idea is more explicit and verbose than other languages, however, which could offer an opportunity to explore the consequences of different designs.
-
Yossi Kreinin ☛ All means are fair except solving the problem
When I was done scrolling his work chat with these helpful suggestions, our unfortunate industry veteran put on a melancholy smile and summarized the situation: “All means are fair except solving the problem.”
-
Andrew Nesbitt ☛ Revisiting the 2015 Open Source Census
The risk index was a sum of points across six axes. You got points for having no website, and up to 3 for past CVEs. A couple for being written in C, a couple for popularity, one or two for network exposure or processing untrusted data. The single heaviest term, worth up to 5 on its own, was having zero contributors in the last twelve months.
This is a model of a specific failure: a widely-deployed C library, parsing bytes off the wire, that everyone has stopped maintaining. It is a model of OpenSSL in early 2014, which is fair enough given why the census was commissioned.
-
Perl / Raku
-
Python
-
LWN ☛ Python packaging council approved [LWN.net]
The Python packaging world now has a formal governance council, of the form described in PEP 772 ("Packaging Council governance process"), which was approved by the steering council on April 16. It has been over a year since the PEP was first proposed in February 2025 and it has undergone lengthy discussions in multiple postings to the Python discussion forum. The packaging council will have "
broad authority over packaging standards, tools, and implementations
"; it will consist of five members who will be elected in a vote that is likely to come in June—after PyCon US 2026 is held mid-May.The packaging council is modeled on the steering council and the more recent typing council. It is meant to be the decision-making body for Python packaging; the steering council will explicitly delegate its PEP-deciding role for relevant PEPs to the packaging council. Currently, the steering council has appointed Paul Moore and Donald Stufft as delegates to decide on packaging PEPs under the auspices of the Python packaging authority (PyPA).
The PyPA is a loose organization of packaging projects; it predates PEP 609 ("Python Packaging Authority (PyPA) Governance") from 2019 that set out to document how the group operates. The Packaging working group was set up by the Python Software Foundation (PSF) to help organize packaging projects, some of which attracted grants from sponsors, such as the overhaul of the Python Package Index (PyPI) in 2017. As PEP 772 points out, however, neither of those two groups has a "
community elected body
", which is what the PEP is meant to address.
-
-
Java/Golang
-
Anton Zhiyanov ☛ Solod v0.1: Go ergonomics, practical stdlib, native C interop
Solod (So) is a system-level language with Go syntax and zero runtime. It's designed for two main audiences: [...]
-
US NIST ☛ Cryptographic Module Validation Program CMVP: Certificate #5247
Go Cryptographic Module
-