Wilfred miniblog

Jul 15, 2023

I've been thinking about making difftastic smarter about context. In principle it understands structure, so I could limit context to the enclosing definition. However, sometimes it's nice to see surrounding code. Line 644 isn't useful, but maybe 655 is. Opinions?

Jul 13, 2023

I've released difftastic 0.48! Highlights in this release: * Subword highlighting in replaced strings! This is a big improvement in many situations. * Better Scala parsing * Better Haskell handling

Release 0.48.0 · Wilfred/difftastic

Difftastic is a structural diff tool that understands syntax. See the manual to get started, and the changelog for historical changes. Parsing Updated Scala parser. Improved parsing of qualified mo...

Jul 12, 2023

A neat IDE feature from Typescript 5.2: it completes object field names even if the previous field doesn't end with a comma! Syntax recovery is super helpful sometimes.

Announcing TypeScript 5.2 Beta - TypeScript

Today we are excited to announce the availability of TypeScript 5.2 Beta. To get started using the beta, you can get it through NuGet, or through npm with the following command: npm install -D typescript@beta Here’s a quick list of what’s new in TypeScript 5.2! using Declarations and Explicit Resource Management Decorator Metadata Named and […]

Jul 11, 2023

@aburka Interesting, today I learnt. I don't know the history of this syntax: there doesn't seem to be much precedent for ^ as a range in any PLs that I can think of.

Jul 10, 2023

I struggle with dependency syntax. I never remember what ^1.2.3 means or how it differs from ~1.2.3. I believe both npm and cargo assign the same meanings to this notation, but it's less obvious than e.g. 1.x. 1.2.3 isn't an exact version constraint either!

Specifying Dependencies - The Cargo Book

Jul 10, 2023

One interesting technique to reduce the review burden in Home Assistant, a project with a large community: ask PR authors to review other PRs! Screenshot is from

Add error sensor to Roborock by Lash-L · Pull Request #96209 · home-assistant/core

Breaking change Proposed change This sensor will let users know if there is currently an issue with their vacuum. Type of change Dependency upgrade Bugfix (non-breaking change which fixes an ...

Jul 9, 2023

A great deep dive on building GitHub's code view, optimising React, scaling to thousands whilst supporting both Ctrl-F and syntax highlighting:

Crafting a better, faster code view

The new GitHub Code View brings users many new features to improve the code reading and exploration experiences, and we overcame a number of unique technical hurdles in order to deliver those features without compromising performance.

Jul 8, 2023

Today I learnt about Solargraph, an LSP for Ruby which includes an impressive amount of type inference and type checking! https://solargraph.org/guides/type-checking Type signatures are parsed from doc comments, similar to JSDoc with TypeScript.

Type Checking Ruby with Solargraph

Jul 5, 2023

Sweep is a really impressive demo of LLMs with coding: given your source code and an issue, it will generate a PR! Example: https://github.com/edreisMD/plugnplai/issues/65 I'd want to have a really thorough test suite if I was accepting LLM PRs though.

Only allow activating a maximum of 3 plugins · Issue #65 · edreisMD/plugnplai

The description prompt becames too big as you add too many plugins. A max of 3 seems to be a good limit, and its the same number as OpenAI allows on ChatGPT.

Jul 4, 2023

Steve Jobs famously asked for smooth scrolling (i.e. not line-by-line) in a Smalltalk demonstration and they changed the UI live. Here's a lovely 2 minute YouTube video demonstrating that modification: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eEz08IlcNMg

Jun 27, 2023

Here's a tricky diff situation I haven't seen before: a minimal text diff can be ugly. It would be nicer to match line 6 on the left with line 3 on the right, so the removed region is contiguous. (git-diff handles this case nicely already.)

Jun 27, 2023

Structs are great in Rust, but sometimes I find them a bit heavyweight. There's a little more syntax than e.g. OCaml, for type definitions and usages. I end up using more structs (records) in OCaml as a result. rust-analyzer has "convert tuple to named struct", which helps.

Jun 25, 2023

I've realised that my favourite side projects all have fiddly bits. It's really nice to have small features that you can add or debug in a few minutes.

Jun 24, 2023

> If you work on PLs long enough, you will develop a finely honed skill at creating bizarre programs like this that are technically valid but likely to trip up an implementation written by someone with a less perverse imagination than you.

Closures · Crafting Interpreters

Jun 22, 2023

I've written CLI programs, GUIs, websites, but never a smartphone app. I suspect it would be tricky: playing with your WIP app on a laptop doesn't feel the same as loading it on a handset. Have you ever written a smartphone app to scratch an itch? How was it?

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