GNU Make defaults to a single worker, and newer build tools (e.g. ninja) default to the number of physical CPUs. I wish there was an option for 'leave me a little bit of my machine to do stuff'.
One interesting design choice in Emacs that I haven't seen in other editors: reserved shortcuts.
An Emacs extension shouldn't use F5 through F12, or Ctrl-c LETTER. This lets users configure their own shortcuts. https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/emacs/Key-Bindings.html
Does it exist elsewhere? I miss it in VS Code, where e.g. all the Fn keys are already assigned.
Today I learnt about a cunning trick used by GNU diff to make Myer's algorithm faster: https://github.com/mitsuhiko/similar/issues/15
If you do an initial pass to find items that only occur on one side, you can discard them before diffing! They'll always be shown as changed.