miniblog.

Adding a new language to difftastic is straightforward, but it requires some configuration and testing. I just started with languages I've recently used. I'm trying to be more quantitative and use GitHub data: https://madnight.github.io/githut/ What languages would you like to see?

I'm delighted to announce difftastic 0.8! In this release: * tree-sitter parsers are much improved and now the default * added support for Python and Java * better handling of added/removed files

"When your Rust code breaks, look at unsafe blocks." I initially parsed this as "consider adding unsafe blocks"! Turns out they meant "crashes are more likely to be caused by existing unsafe blocks". Phew.

Applying PGO to rustc (on both LLVM and the Rust-based frontend) can provide a ~10% improvement to compile time! https://blog.rust-lang.org/inside-rust/2020/11/11/exploring-pgo-for-the-rust-compiler.html This has been recently merged to Rust's CI:

Taking a break from debugging graph traversal algorithms to give difftastic a logo :)

One problem with syntactic-based diff tools (like difftastic) is that they can show confusing results when replacing a function. I've realised that traditional diffs have the same problem! There's one common line between old and new, and diff has matched the closing parens.

Why swap is still relevant on modern systems, regardless of the amount of RAM available: https://chrisdown.name/2018/01/02/in-defence-of-swap.html

earlyoom is a neat linux tool that kills processes a little earlier, so your system remains responsive: https://github.com/rfjakob/earlyoom The readme is pretty educational too, and even encourages you to `tail /dev/zero` to see it in action!

Based on job ads, Apple is already designing devices with RISC-V components!

Write a single cross-platform app or do native development on each platform? The ability to ship the same features everywhere without team co-ordination is a major win:

The next release of difftastic should have Python support! The screenshot doesn't look terribly impressive, but it's showing that difftastic now understands that whitespace is meaningful in Python. Tree-sitter has a pre-existing Python parser we can use :)

rust-analyzer is experimenting with a really clever feature: allow types to open a link to their external docs! https://github.com/rust-analyzer/rust-analyzer/blob/master/docs/dev/lsp-extensions.md#open-external-documentation I've definitely thought about referencing external resources from an editor: in principle you could even fetch the first paragraph inline too!

Fun post looking at an impressive transformation in clang and tracing it through the different optimisation passes:

Meta-FizzBuzz: Implement a sufficiently complete programming language that you can write FizzBuzz in it!

I've added some new keybindings to deadgrep.el, so I split the shortcut tables into two categories: https://github.com/Wilfred/deadgrep#keybindings I've done this purely by intuition. Are there good rules or heuristics for deciding when more hierarchy is needed in information, I wonder?