General Programming Discussion

Code reviews are essential for improving software quality and fostering team collaboration. I explore why they matter, who benefits, and how to integrate them effectively into your development process.

I wrote a CLI tool that generates basic scaffolding for all sorts of coding projects, from Zig applications to NPM packages.

The GNU C Library version 2.41 is now available.

I wrote a program that turns the feed it receives from your webcam in ASCII art. It's open source: you can find the code on Github.

Forgejo is a self-hosted lightweight software forge. In version 10.0: TOTP secrets were made more secure. The UI was made more accessible and reworked to improve the UX. Searching users, repositories, releases and issues was improved. Low German (Plattdüütsch) translation was completed. This is the last version to allow a transparent upgrade from Gitea v1.22 or lower.

After nearly 2 years of work, I'm excited to release the first version of bjForth, featuring partial JONESFORTH compatibility and initial Java interop.

Hey all.

The Khronos Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies dedicated to creating advanced interoperability standards, has announced the release of Vulkan 1.4, the latest version of its cross-platform 3D graphics and compute API. Vulkan 1.4 integrates and mandates support for many proven features into its core specification, expanding the functionality that is consistently available to developers, greatly simplifying application development and deployment across multiple platforms.

If there was one reason I liked coding in Java, it'd be AssertJ and its brilliant extensibility.

bmakelib (which is a minimalist standard library for GNU Make) v0.8.0 was released last week.

This article compares two tools, Sanitizers and Valgrind, that find memory bugs in programs written in memory-unsafe languages. These two tools work in very different ways. Therefore, while Sanitizers (developed by Google engineers) presents several advantages over Valgrind, each has strengths and weaknesses. Note that the Sanitizers project has a plural name because the suite consists of several tools, which we will explore in this article.

The Open Source Initiative (OSI) released the RC1 (“Release Candidate 1” meaning: This thing is basically done and will be released as such unless something catastrophic happens) of the “Open Source AI Definition“.

OGRE has grown to become one of the most popular open-source graphics rendering engines. It’s been 2 years since 2.3.0 and almost a year since the last 2.3.x release. It’s about time for 3.0.0! - Ogre to OgreNext name migration - Dealing with ABI mismatches: AbiCookie - ABI Semver - Move to C++11 and general cleanup

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) support for the C23 programming language standard is now considered "essentially feature-complete" with GCC 15. As such they are preparing to enable the C23 language version (using the GNU23 dialect) by default for the C language version of GCC when not otherwise specified.

This new edition has been the occasion to overhaul the presentation in many places, but its main purpose is the update to the new C standard, C23. The goal was to publish this new edition of Modern C at the same time as the new C standard goes through the procedure of ISO publication. The closest approximation of the contents of the new standard in a publicly available document can be found here. New releases of major compilers already implement most of the new features that it brings.

This is a simple experimental Lisp compiler, written in uLisp, that will compile a Lisp function into RISC-V machine code. You can run the compiler on the RISC-V core of a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 (or another RP2350-based board)

We are thrilled to announce the release of Qt 6.8, packed with support for new desktop, mobile, and embedded platforms, hundreds of improvements, and exciting new features to boost your development experience and meet the needs of demanding applications.

Recently I wondered what I get in term of C++ features for upgrading my system from version 13 to 14 of GCC...

Vulkan 1.3.296 is out as the first spec update in nearly one month. Given the time that has passed there are more bug fixes than usual but there is also a prominent new extension: VK_EXT_device_generated_commands. It has been worked on by Valve’s Linux graphics driver developers along with engineers from Intel, AMD, NVIDIA, Collabora, and others. This new extension allows for the GPU device to generate a number of commands for command buffers.

Hi ! I’ve been working on this article for the past few days. It would mean a lot to me if you could provide some feedback.

Two-dimensional vector graphics has been quite prevalent in recent Qt release notes, and it is something we have plans to continue exploring in the releases to come. This blog takes a look at some of the options you have, as a Qt developer.

With performance optimizations seemingly having lost their relevance in an era of ever-increasing hardware performance, there are still many good reasons to spend some time optimizing code. In a recent preprint article by [Paul Bilokon] and [Burak Gunduz] of the Imperial College London the focus is specifically on low-latency patterns.

Shameless plug: I am the author.

It’s been over a year since Khronos started working on the Vulkan SC Ecosystem. Now that the component stack has reached a high level of maturity, it seemed appropriate to write an article about the secret sauce behind the Vulkan SC Ecosystem components that enabled us to leverage the industry-proven Vulkan Ecosystem components to provide corresponding developer tooling for the safety-critical variant of the API.

Performance optimisation matters when you are trying to get your application working in a resource-constrained environment. This is typically the case in embedded but also in some desktop scenarious you may run short on resources so it’s not a matter without significance on desktop either.

Codevis is a Large Scale software visualizer, focused on C++ codebases. it can help you identify issues and smells in your codebase. It also has an extensive plugin interface and some preliminary scripting support.

🤖 I'm a bot that provides automatic summaries for articles: Click here to see the summaryThis is the best summary I could come up with: Even though the research commissioned by consultancy Engprax could be seen as a thinly veiled plug for Impact Engineering methodology, it feeds into the suspicion that the Agile Manifesto might not be all it's cracked up to be. One standout statistic was that projects with clear requirements documented before development started were 97 percent more likely to succeed. "Our research has shown that what matters when it comes to delivering high-quality software on time and within budget is a robust requirements engineering process and having the psychological safety to discuss and solve problems when they emerge, whilst taking steps to prevent developer burnout." A neverending stream of patches indicates that quality might not be what it once was, and code turning up in an unfinished or ill-considered state have all been attributed to Agile practices. One Agile developer criticized the daily stand-up element, describing it to The Register as "a feast of regurgitation." In highlighting the need to understand the requirements before development begins, the research charts a path between Agile purists and Waterfall advocates. The original article contains 501 words, the summary contains 175 words. Saved 65%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

Since we first announced it last year, our Vulkan wrapper KDGpu has been busy evolving to meet customer needs and our own. Our last post announced the public release of v0.1.0, and version 0.5.0 is available today. It’s never been easier to interact with modern graphics technologies, enabling you to focus on the big picture instead of hassling with the intricacies and nuances of Vulkan.

New language promises to reduce compilation times by using all threads and gpu cores available on your machine. What's your opinions on it so far?

The next major version of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), 14.1, was released on May 7 2024. Like every major GCC release, this version brings many additions, improvements, bug fixes, and new features.

Just wanted to share some (exciting) news about my Common Lisp project, euler-cl. I finally got the time to sit down and integrate it with Codecov! This means a couple of cool things:

A comprehensive guide to Hack Club's inner circle, potential labor law violations, union busting, and fundamental lack of transparency, democracy & respect for members.

"Programming: Principles and Practice using C++ (3rd Edition)", aka PPP3, is an introduction to programming for people who have never programmed before. It will also be useful for people who have programmed a bit and want to improve their style and technique - or simply learn modern C++. It is designed for classroom use, but written with an eye on self study. Ealier versions of this book have been used as the basis for first programming classes for electrical engineering, computer engineering, and computer science students at Texas A&M University and in many other places.

The Khronos® Group, an open consortium of industry-leading companies creating advanced interoperability standards, announces the immediate availability of the OpenXR™ 1.1 specification. This release evolves the widely adopted OpenXR open API standard for high-performance, cross-platform access to VR, AR, and mixed reality (MR) — collectively known as XR—platforms and devices. OpenXR 1.1 consolidates widely used API extensions into the core specification to reduce fragmentation and adds new functionality to streamline the development of more powerful and efficient XR applications.

While the task of writing a brand new standard-compliant browser engine is infamous as being almost unachievable nowadays (and certainly so with Chromium coming in at 31 million lines of code), the Rust ecosystem has been brewing up a new web rendering engine called Servo. Initially created by Mozilla in 2012, Servo is still being developed today, now under the stewardship of the Linux Foundation.

Qt 6.7 is out with lots of large and small improvements for all of us who like to have fun when building modern applications and user experiences. Several additions are released as technology previews, and we are looking forward to your feedback so that we can get everything ready for the next LTS release!

AMD's HIP Ray-Tracing library "HIP RT" has been one of the few projects under the GPUOpen umbrella that starts off as closed-source software but then is eventually open-sourced... That happened now with the HIP ray-tracing code becoming publicly available.

If you've found yourself manually crafting complex Docker images or repeatedly installing tools, I've got something for you 😁

There’s been a lot of noise recently about contributing to Open Source. Many developers contribute to Open Source projects for various reasons, including building their commit history for recruiters or gaining visibility through badges. However, experienced Open Source contributors have observed a troubling trend: contributing is seen as an obligation and a badge of honor, leading to frustration when it’s not straightforward.

Andrzej Janik has released ZLUDA 3, a new version of his open-source project that enables GPU-based applications designed for NVIDIA GPUs to run on other manufacturers’ hardware. The wrapper technology is designed to enable existing applications to run on new hardware unmodified, without the need for any work on their developers’ part.

Release 14.2 of GDB, the GNU Debugger, is now available. GDB is a source-level debugger for Ada, C, C++, Fortran, Go, Rust, and many other languages. GDB can target (i.e., debug programs running on) more than a dozen different processor architectures, and GDB itself can run on most popular GNU/Linux, Unix and Microsoft Windows variants. GDB is free (libre) software.

Vulkan 1.3.279 debuted on Friday with many fixes/clarifications to the specifications plus one new extension. The VK_NV_raw_access_chains extemsion should allow for more efficient shaders compiled from HLSL sources.

Extensions available in RISC-V enable the customizations that make it ideal as a basis for open innovation. Here’s the extension situation as it stands today.

This tutorial will teach you how to use the OpenXR API. OpenXR is an API managed by the Khronos Group which provides a cross-platform way for applications to interact with immersive devices. This includes virtual reality (VR) headsets, augmented reality (AR) devices, motion controllers and more.

Eight years after launching the Vulkan database to the public, it’s approaching 30,000 uploaded reports from more than 3,300 different devices across Windows, Linux, Android, MacOS and iOS. With that much data available, good filtering capabilities are crucial.

We are excited to announce that with the latest release of Steam Audio, the complete source code of the Steam Audio SDK is now available as open source. With this release, our goal is to provide more control to developers, which will lead to better experiences for their users, and hopefully valuable contributions back to the wider community of developers using Steam Audio.

With this step, we are opening Qt SVG up to support elements beyond SVG Tiny 1.2. This means that we will aim to include useful and common elements from SVG 1.1 and SVG 2.0, if maintenance is reasonably feasible. We will not aim for compliance with these standards but we will keep an eye on feature requests from our users. Further, we are open to contributions of such extensions by the community. So if you miss your favorite SVG element in the list above, fell free to send us some code, preferably on our code review platform.

etk is a library for the Ebitengine game engine that simplifies creating graphical user interfaces. The README lists the features and widgets. Boxcars uses etk to greatly simplify UI development, as its single codebase targets web, desktop and Android.

If you use a compiled language, you should periodically look at Godbolt and see what your code is doing and what changes to your code will do in the compiled output.