Webtagr - Technology News Summarizer

Turning Google Sheets into Handy Web Apps: A Programmer's Tale

2024-12-31

An Ars Technica reporter shares his journey of transforming simple Google Sheets into phone-friendly web apps using Glide. Initially created to streamline takeout ordering, the app manages local restaurant information with efficient search and filtering. He expanded his approach to create apps for recipes and pantry items, improving daily life. The article showcases the power of no-code tools and how simple solutions can solve real-world problems, highlighting ingenuity and a quest for better living.

(arstechnica.com)

Development

Linux Kernel Initial Commit SHA Collision Risk

2024-12-31

Kees Cook, a Linux kernel developer, discovered a kernel documentation commit whose ID shares the first 12 characters with the initial commit in the kernel's repository. This potential collision could break various tools relying on unique commit IDs. While not yet merged upstream, this commit serves as a test case to proactively address SHA collisions and prevent future widespread issues.

(lwn.net)

Development SHA collision

Lightstorm: A Minimalistic Ruby Compiler Boosts Performance with MLIR

2024-12-31

The DragonRuby team developed Lightstorm, a minimalistic Ruby compiler aimed at improving the performance of their cross-platform game engine. Leveraging MLIR, Lightstorm translates mruby VM bytecode into C code, optimizing performance by eliminating load/store and branch operations within the VM's interpreter loop. Benchmark results show performance improvements ranging from 1% to 1200%, with an average reduction of roughly 30% in execution time and cycles. While currently supporting a subset of Ruby, the project validates the feasibility of pre-compiling Ruby code for performance gains. Future plans include replacing critical C components of the engine with compiled Ruby code.

(blog.llvm.org)

Development Ruby compiler

LineageOS 22.1 Released: 30x Faster Extraction, New Music and PDF Apps

2024-12-31

LineageOS 22.1, based on Android 15 QPR1, is now available with significant improvements. Extraction utilities are 30 times faster, and two new apps have been added: Twelve, a music player, and Camelot, a PDF reader. SeedVault, Etar, and WebView have also been updated. Versioning has been adjusted to align with Android's minor version numbers, making it easier to distinguish Android versions. The project has streamlined its codebase, added support for more devices, and encourages developers to contribute code and translations.

(lineageos.org)

Development

Lightweight Sum Types and Switches for Lua: lua-match

2024-12-31

lua-match is a minimalistic Lua library providing sum types and switch functionality. It leverages a tagging function for a clean and efficient way to handle various data types and conditional branching. With a simple tagging function and a switch table, you can easily implement sum type-like behavior and pattern matching, simplifying your Lua code significantly. The library is open-source and uses the MIT license.

(github.com)

Development Sum Types

Developer Creates Game Boy Advance Game in Zig

2024-12-31

A developer created a Game Boy Advance game, 2048, using the emerging programming language Zig. The article highlights Zig's advantages in embedded programming, particularly its streamlined cross-compilation process, efficient memory management (including packed structs), and powerful compile-time code generation. The author contrasts the development experience using C++ versus Zig, noting Zig's ease and efficiency in handling the Game Boy Advance's peculiar memory layout and hardware registers. While Zig has some shortcomings, such as limited inline assembly and Thumb instruction support, its numerous advantages make it an ideal choice for developing games for retro consoles.

(jonot.me)

Development Embedded Development

Why Linux Still Isn't Ready for the Desktop

2024-12-30

This article delves into the deep-seated reasons why Linux hasn't achieved widespread desktop adoption. The author highlights several key issues: poor software compatibility between distributions, frequent updates leading to bugs and regressions, insufficient funding resulting in subpar software quality, inadequate hardware driver support, and challenges in communicating within the Linux community. While Linux excels in server environments, its desktop presence remains hampered by these persistent obstacles, hindering its ability to compete effectively with established operating systems like Windows.

(itvision.altervista.org)

Development desktop software compatibility

Coding Font Tournament Crowns Source Code Pro

2024-12-30

John Gruber of Daring Fireball highlights a fun coding font selection 'tournament' created by Typogram. Users choose their favorite from 32 free monospaced fonts. While some popular choices like Consolas are absent, and some included fonts are less appealing, it's a worthwhile exercise. Improvements since its initial launch include a JavaScript code example instead of CSS and a wider selection of fonts. Gruber recommends disabling font names to reduce bias. His consistent winner? Adobe's Source Code Pro, with IBM Plex Mono a close second.

(daringfireball.net)

Development coding fonts

RubyConf 2024: Cloud Native Buildpack Hackday

2024-12-30

Richard Schneeman is hosting a Cloud Native Buildpack (CNB) hackday at RubyConf 2024 to help developers learn about and contribute to Ruby deployment tools. The event offers tasks of varying difficulty, from modifying existing buildpacks to creating new ones, catering to different skill levels. Even if you can't attend in person, you can still participate using the provided resources.

(www.schneems.com)

Development Cloud Native Buildpacks Ruby Deployment

Database Mocks: More Trouble Than They're Worth?

2024-12-30

While tempting for their speed and simplicity, the author argues that using database mocks for testing ultimately causes more problems than they solve. A user creation example highlights the differences between mocking and testing against a real database. Real database testing reveals potential issues early on, such as unique constraint violations, default value handling, and performance bottlenecks, saving debugging time and reducing production risks. As applications evolve and schemas change, real database tests better handle new validations, data type modifications, and timestamp precision changes, ensuring code aligns with the actual database. The author suggests prioritizing real database testing for data access layers, while using it at the service layer to expose business logic interactions with data. Controllers, however, can mock service calls effectively. Balancing real database tests and mocks is key to building robust applications.

(www.shayon.dev)

Development database testing mocking software testing

Homa Network Protocol: A New Challenger to TCP/UDP

2024-12-30

Homa is a novel network transport protocol designed for data center applications, aiming to reduce the overhead of transmitting numerous small messages. Unlike traditional TCP/UDP, it eliminates connection setup, employing a unique request-response mechanism and prioritized queues to minimize latency. Currently, Homa is striving for inclusion in the Linux kernel, but its future may heavily rely on hardware acceleration within network devices.

(lwn.net)

Development network protocol data center

Evaluating LLMs' Code Generation Capabilities: Introducing MultiCodeBench

2024-12-30

AI-powered programming assistants based on code Large Language Models (LLMs) have become increasingly prevalent, significantly boosting developer productivity. However, existing code generation benchmarks primarily focus on general-purpose scenarios, leaving the performance of LLMs in specific application domains largely unknown. This paper introduces MultiCodeBench, a new benchmark comprising 2,400 programming tasks across 12 popular software development domains and 15 programming languages. Experiments on eleven mainstream LLMs reveal their code generation performance across different domains, offering practical insights for developers in selecting LLMs and guidance for model developers to enhance domain-specific code generation capabilities.

(arxiv.org)

Development Code Generation

ts_zip: Text Compression with Large Language Models

2024-12-30

Fabrice Bellard's new tool, ts_zip, leverages the RWKV 169M v4 language model to achieve significantly higher text compression ratios than traditional methods. While requiring a GPU and 4GB RAM, and slower than conventional compressors (up to 1 MB/s on an RTX 4090), ts_zip demonstrates impressive compression on English and other languages, including source code. Compression ratio is measured in bits per byte (bpb), with results showing superior performance to xz on datasets like enwik8 and enwik9. Deterministic model evaluation ensures consistent decompression across different hardware and software configurations.

(bellard.org)

Development text compression

Breakthrough in Evaluating Large Language Models for Unit Test Generation

2024-12-30

Researchers conducted a comprehensive evaluation of the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs) in automating unit test generation. They compared the performance of five open-source LLMs against the closed-source GPT-4 and the traditional tool Evosuite across 17 Java projects, investigating the impact of different prompting strategies. The study found that open-source LLMs offer advantages in data privacy and outperform in certain tasks, but also revealed limitations in LLM-based unit test generation. This research provides valuable insights to guide future applications of LLMs in this area.

(arxiv.org)

Development Unit Testing

Diaspora* Internal Team Communication Notice

2024-12-30

This excerpt is from an internal Diaspora* team communication. It states that the website requires JavaScript to function correctly and provides instructions on how to report content, including the reporting criteria. It also links to Diaspora* project discussions and support, along with website information such as code version, pod statistics, terms of service, contact information, and a touch-optimized mode switch.

(pod.geraspora.de)

Development Website Maintenance

SQLite: The Unbelievable Database Legend

2024-12-30

SQLite, the world's most widely deployed database, is maintained by a three-person team, rejecting external contributions, yet conquering the world with its exceptional performance and stability. Born on a US warship to solve server downtime issues, it has become the cornerstone of trillions of databases. SQLite is not open source, but rather public domain software, with fewer restrictions than any open source license. Its rigorous testing process, even simulating extreme situations like operating system crashes, ensures its incredibly high reliability. However, its unique business model—generating revenue through paid support and memberships—is also noteworthy. The legend of SQLite lies not only in its technical prowess but also in the persistence and innovation behind it.

(avi.im)

Development legend

New Short Message Compression Tool: ts_sms

2024-12-30

ts_sms is a new tool for short message compression using large language models. It employs lossless compression, reducing bits by identifying and eliminating statistical redundancy without information loss. Compared to tools like brotli, ts_sms shows advantages in compressing small messages. Both Linux and Windows versions are available. Its core technology is similar to ts_zip, utilizing a specific padding system compatible with arithmetic coding, eliminating the need to explicitly encode message length.

(bellard.org)

Development

Execution Units are Often Pipelined

The International Obfuscated C Code Contest (IOCCC) is holding its 28th competition, marking its 40th anniversary. This event celebrates creativity and quirky coding skills within the C programming language. To use the Mastodon web application, JavaScript is required; alternatively, consider using a native Mastodon app.

(fosstodon.org)

Development coding competition

Issues with Object-Oriented Programming in Guile

2024-12-30

This article explores the discrepancies between Guile Scheme's object-oriented programming system, GOOPS, and Common Lisp's Object System (CLOS), highlighting GOOPS's shortcomings. GOOPS lacks the elegance and robustness of CLOS in several key areas: setter specialization doesn't compose with inheritance, it lacks before/after/around method qualifiers, method combination algorithms are not controllable, method argument specialization is limited, keyword arguments are unsupported, and documentation strings are absent. The author suggests improvements such as mimicking CLOS behavior, adding method qualifiers, and enhancing method argument specialization to improve code elegance and reduce bugs.

(dthompson.us)

Development

Building a Full Computer Emulator in C: From NAND Gate to Tetris

2024-12-30

This project aims to build a complete computer emulator in C from scratch, following the NandToTetris course. It starts with a single NAND gate and progressively builds more complex chips like multiplexers and demultiplexers, ultimately culminating in a system capable of running Tetris. Unlike other emulator projects that start at the CPU level, this one meticulously constructs the entire hardware stack. The project is in its early stages, with the author planning to implement an assembler after completing the hardware components.

(github.com)

Development computer emulator C programming

Category: Development