Programming Leftovers

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Sep 27, 2026

• Sebastian ☛ a hacky fucked up way to portably access errno from outside of c

  here's something really cursed i made a while back. the goal here is to create a portable way to obtain the value of errno from outside of c, without using a wrapper function written in c.

• Lzon ☛ Algoma docs and website

  Despite not communicating much publically about it, work is still very much on-going on Algoma. The language overall is maturing, and I’ve also added some interesting features of my own as well as borrowed from other languages.

  As of now I’m trying to stop adding new features and syntax. Its very tempting, especially since I’ve gotten better at language implementation and can more easily write the code that reflects my ideas.

• Andrew Nesbitt ☛ This Week in Package Management: 26 September 2026

  Releases, advisories, and articles from across the package management world

• LWN ☛ GDB 18.1 released

  Version 18.1 of the GDB interactive debugger has been released. Changes

  include new commands to manipulate the environment of the subprocess, the

  ability to save the command history to a file, support for a couple of new

  targets, several Python API additions, and more. See the

  NEWS file for the complete list.

• Alex Ewerlöf ☛ Coding is NOT solved

  Tell me you don’t understand software without literally using those words!!!

  People who claim “LLMs can write decent code” don’t understand how code works. Sure, creation is much cheaper, but anyone who has run software in production at scale knows that maintenance, reliability, security, scalability, etc. is the majority of the cost. These are commonly known as NFR (non-functional requirements).

• Perl / Raku

  • Arne Sommer ☛ Convert Product with Raku

    You are given a string.

    Write a script to convert the given string to palindrome by adding characters in front of it.

• Python

  • Sebastian ☛ an incomplete list of non-syntax things python raises SyntaxError for

    in an earlier post i briefly talked about how SyntaxError is a lie, showing some expressions which aren't prohibited by the grammar but which still raise SyntaxError when compiled. this blog post expands on that with a bunch more examples.

    (see the very end for notes on what i did and didn't decide to include in this list)

• Shell/Bash/Zsh/Ksh

  • University of Toronto ☛ Changing your (Unix) terminal appearance on a per-host basis

    Pretty much all Unix terminal emulators allow you to change the font from the command line when you start the program, either directly or by picking which 'profile' to use in the new terminal. If you can use some sort of launcher for your terminal programs that know what host you're going to SSH to, you can use this to select the font (and then possibly automatically run ssh to the host). This doesn't help if you're going to use the same terminal instance to SSH to several different hosts when you want different fonts for each of them, but it's the best you can do for fonts. Terminals that require you to set up profiles for this will become annoying if you want to use a lot of fonts, especially if there are other parts of the profiles that you want to keep synchronized.

• Java/Golang

  • Anton Zhiyanov ☛ Go concurrency distilled

    This mini-book provides a brief overview of many concurrency topics in Go. Each topic comes with interactive examples — feel free to experiment with them by changing the code and clicking Run. There's also a PDF version with static examples.

    "This is a quick refresher on Go concurrency, not a beginner's guide. If you want to learn concurrency from the ground up with practical exercises, check out my other book — Gist of Go: Concurrency."

    The book is AI-free.