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The Performance Impact Of C++’s `final` Keyword For Optimization

In the world of software development the term ‘optimization’ is generally reason for experienced developers to start feeling decidedly nervous, especially when a feature is marked as an…

FLOSS Weekly Episode 780: Zoneminder — Better Call Randal

This week Jonathan Bennett and Aaron Newcomb chat with Isaac Connor about Zoneminder! That’s the project that’s working to store and deliver all the bits from security cameras — b…

Programming Ada: First Steps On The Desktop

Who doesn’t want to use a programming language that is designed to be reliable, straightforward to learn and also happens to be certified for everything from avionics to rockets and ICBMs? De…

Compiling And Running Turbo Pascal In The Browser

When a friend of [Lawrence Kesteloot] found a stack of 3.5″ floppy disks, they found that it contained Turbo Pascal code which the two of them had worked on back in the Summer of 1989. Amidst…

Porting Modern Windows Applications To Windows 95

Windows 95 was an amazing operating system that would forever transform the world of home computing, setting the standard for user interaction on a desktop and quite possibly was the OS which had t…

Dump A Code Repository As A Text File, For Easier Sharing With Chatbots

Some LLMs (Large Language Models) can act as useful programming assistants when provided with a project’s source code, but experimenting with this can get a little tricky if the chatbot has n…

Git Good, By Playing A Gamified Version Of Git

What better way to learn to use Git than a gamified interface that visualizes every change? That’s the idea behind Oh My Git! which aims to teach players all about the popular version control…

Query Your C Code

If you’ve ever worked on a large project — your own or a group effort — you know it can be difficult to find exactly where you want to be in the source code. Sure, you can use cta…

Fortran And WebAssembly: Bringing Zippy Linear Algebra To NodeJS & Browsers

With the rise of WebAssembly (wasm) it’s become easier than ever to run native code in a browser. As mostly just another platform to target, it would be remiss if Fortran was not a part of th…

Jpegli: Google’s Better JPEG And Possible Death Knell For WebP

Along with the rise of the modern World Wide Web came the introduction of the JPEG image compression standard in 1992, allowing for high-quality images to be shared without requiring the download o…

Exploit The Stressed-out Package Maintainer, Exploit The Software Package

A recent security vulnerability — a potential ssh backdoor via the liblzma library in the xz package — is having a lot of analysis done on how the vulnerability was introduced, and [Rob…

Is Your Mental Model Of Bash Pipelines Wrong?

[Michael Lynch] encountered a strange situation. Why was compiling then running his program nearly 10x faster than just running the program by itself? [Michael] ran into this issue while benchmarki…

Hybrid Binaries On Windows For ARM: ARM64EC And ARM64X Explained

With ARM processors increasingly becoming part of the desktop ecosystem, porting code that was written for x86_64 platforms is both necessary and a massive undertaking. For many codebases a simple …

Galvanize Your Grip On Grep With This Great Grep Guide

These days, you can’t throw a USB stick without hitting something that’s running Linux. It might be a phone, an embedded device, or your TV. Either way, it’s running Linux, and so…

Obfuscated C 8080 Emulator Ported

[Oscar] is no stranger to writing hard-to-read C code. While most of us do that by accident, there are those who strive to write the most unreadable code and enter it in the IOCCC — the Inter…

Radicle: An Open-Source, Peer-to-Peer, GitHub Alternative

The actions of certain large social networks have recently highlighted how a small number of people possess significant power over the masses and how this power is sometimes misused. Consequently, …

Making Floating Point Calculations Less Cursed When Accuracy Matters

An unfortunate reality of trying to represent continuous real numbers in a fixed space (e.g. with a limited number of bits) is that this comes with an inevitable loss of both precision and accuracy…

The White House Memory Safety Appeal Is A Security Red Herring

In the Holy Programming Language Wars, the lingua franca of system programming – also known as C – is often lambasted for being unsecure, error-prone, and plagued with more types of beh…

The ELIZA Archaeology Project: Uncovering The Original ELIZA

Since ELIZA was created by [Joseph Weizenbaum] in the 1960s, its success had led to many variations and ports being written over the intervening decades. The goal of the ELIZA Archaeology Project b…