miniblog.

GitHub language popularity, TIOBE ranking and Stack Overflow question frequency are amazingly uncorrelated. Do we have any reliable numbers?

You can learn so much about asm programming by simply looking at compiler output. I've learnt that lea is remarkably useful for arithmetic.

I'm still periodically surprised by how flexible Emacs is with symbol naming. Today's surprise: @ is acceptable!

Now that the dust is settling on ? instead of try! in Rust, there's a neat tool to automatically migrate your code:

Turns out that @rustlang lets you collapse docs for an overview! I'd wanted this for ages and it's already possible!

Magit 2.6 is out! https://emacsair.me/2016/03/29/magit-2.6/ "No keybindings were hurt in this release" :) plus performance improvements!

Fun morning hack: add pkg-config libraries to flycheck settings! https://github.com/Wilfred/.emacs.d/commit/ffc0e21e9bcb6d53a16db6dd4558346314b66df2 (Emacs practically entices you to extend it!)

Microsoft have developed the opposite of Wine, a compatibility library for running Linux apps on Windows! (I'm unsure of the target market.)

Great, candid account of porting Genode to RISC-V: https://genode.org/documentation/articles/riscv (there are still kinks to be worked out)

Read-Eval-Print-λove v003 - Forth is live https://us7.campaign-archive2.com/?u=9e5111743fcbf47abc854fcd5&id=9a549ee516&e=8674ae8035 (interactive programming, little languages, highly recommended!

TIL there's a proven-correct compiler for standard ML! https://cakeml.org/ This is an incredible feat, and uses validated ISA models.

Accessing individual bits in floats using constexpr https://brnz.org/hbr/?p=1518 (rather tricky, but a great exploration of float representation)

Playing flappy bird in Mario using bugs for arbitrary code execution https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hB6eY73sLV0 (incredible, and done by hand!)

I've discovered https://github.com/gdbinit/Gdbinit as a brilliant default gdb config. Tons of useful information, colour coded!

The smallest piece of great Pharo code https://medium.com/concerning-pharo/tiny-yet-so-beautiful-1ef5149c910e (explores adding methods to built-in classes and idiomatic Smalltalk design)