The baseline here is about 55 ms for nothing, btw. Python ain’t fast to start up.

$ time python -c 'exit(0)'

real    0m0.055s
user    0m0.046s
sys     0m0.007s

Fish 4.3 Brings Scripting & Interactivity Improvements, Enhanced Terminal Support
Fish 4.3 is out today as the newest update to this user-friendly command line shell. Fish 4.0 released at the beginning of this year in porting the codebase from C++ to Rust and now before closing out 2025 they have out Fish 4.3… ⌘ Read more

Open Source Initiative Estimates the ‘Top Open Source Licenses in 2025’
The nonprofit Open Source Initiative offers “enriched” license pages with “relevant metadata to provide deeper insights and better support”.

So which pages got the most pageviews in 2025? The MIT license, Apache 2.0 license, BSD licenses (3-clause and 2-clause), and GNU General Public license:

mit
(1.5M)
apache-2-0
(344k)
bsd-3-c … ⌘ Read more

44% Of GNOME Core Apps Are Written In C, 13% In JavaScript & 10% In Rust
GNOME developer Sophie Herold has shared some interesting end-of-year code stats for the GNOME project. The “GNOME” codebase is up to 6,692,516 lines of code at the end of 2025 with 1,611,526 lines of that being from GNOME apps. Where the data gets interesting is on the programming language breakdown in different areas… ⌘ Read more

My little toy operating system from last year runs in 16-bit Real Mode (like DOS). Since I’ve recently figured out how to switch to 64-bit Long Mode right after BIOS boot, I now have a little program that performs this switch on my toy OS. It will load and run any x86-64 program, assuming it’s freestanding, a flat binary, and small enough (< 128 KiB code, only uses the first 2 MiB of memory).

Here I’m running a little C program (compiled using normal GCC, no Watcom trickery):

https://movq.de/v/b27ced6dcb/los86%2D64.mp4

https://movq.de/v/b27ced6dcb/c.png

Next steps could include:

• Use Rust instead of C for that 64-bit program?
  
• Provide interrupt service routines. (At the moment, it just keeps interrupts disabled.)

@prologic@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh, I take my 0°C over the 36°C anytime! Even with yesterday’s gray and windy sleet in my face. However, there are definitely more pleasant times to walk in town, I’ll give you that. For example on 0°C sunny today: https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2025-12-25/

@prologic@twtxt.net And I froze my ass off yesterday at -5°C and strong winds. 🤣

that’s a whopping 36°C today 🥵

Microsoft Says It’s Not Planning To Use AI To Rewrite Windows From C To Rust
Microsoft has denied any plans to rewrite Windows 11 using AI and Rust after a LinkedIn post from one of its top-level engineers sparked a wave of online backlash by claiming the company’s goal was to “eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030.”

Galen Hunt, a principal software engineer responsible for sever … ⌘ Read more

iOS 26.3 Brings AirPods-Like Pairing To Third-Party Devices In EU Under DMA
Under pressure from the Digital Markets Act, Apple’s iOS 26.3 adds AirPods-style proximity pairing and notification support for third-party accessories in the EU. The changes will roll out to European users in 2026. MacRumors reports: The Digital Markets Act requires Apple to provide third-party accessories with the same c … ⌘ Read more

Micro QuickJS Engine Compiles & Runs JavaScript With As Little As 10kB Of RAM
Very talented open-source developer Fabrice Bellard who already is well known for his work on QEMU, the Tiny C Compiler, and FFmpeg, has another accomplishment: Micro QuickJS. The Micro QuickJS JavaScript engine can compile and run JavaScript programs with as little as 10 kB of RAM… ⌘ Read more

Apple Fined $116 Million Over App Privacy Prompts
Apple has been fined $116 million by Italy’s antitrust regulator over the “excessively burdensome” privacy rules it imposes on third-party apps. From a report: The Italian Competition Authority (AGCM) says that Apple abused its dominant app store market position by burdening developers with “disproportionate” terms around data collection that exceed privacy law requirements, c … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft To Replace All C/C++ Code With Rust By 2030
Microsoft plans to eliminate all C and C++ code across its major codebases by 2030, replacing it with Rust using AI-assisted, large-scale refactoring. “My goal is to eliminate every line of C and C++ from Microsoft by 2030,” Microsoft Distinguished Engineer Galen Hunt writes in a post on LinkedIn. “Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft’s … ⌘ Read more

Parrot OS Switches to KDE Plasma Desktop
“Yet another distro is making the move to the KDE Plasma desktop,” writes Linux magazine.

“Parrot OS, a security-focused Linux distribution, is migrating from MATE to KDE Plasma, starting with version 7.0, now available in beta.”

Based on Debian 13, Parrot OS’s goal is a shift toward “modernization, focusing on clearing technical debt and future-proofing the system.” One big under-the-hood c … ⌘ Read more

Intel ISPC 1.29 Drops Gen9 GPU Targets, Add New Optimizations & Experimental RISC-V
Intel ISPC 1.29 released on Wednesday as the newest feature update to this Implicit SPMD Program Compiler as a C variant able to target Intel hardware from their CPUs to GPUs for SIMD programming… ⌘ Read more

I rewrote all my solutions in Rust (except for day 10 part 2) and these are the runtimes on my i7-3770 from 2013 (this measures CLOCK_PROCESS_CPUTIME_ID, not wallclock):

day01/1 [      00.000501311] Result: 1066
day01/2 [      00.000400298] Result: 6223
day02/1 [      00.000358848] Result: 12586854255
day02/2 [      00.000750711] Result: 17298174201
day03/1 [      00.000106537] Result: 17405
day03/2 [      00.000404632] Result: 171990312704598
day04/1 [      00.000257517] Result: 1626
day04/2 [      00.007495342] Result: 9173
day05/1 [      00.000237212] Result: 505
day05/2 [      00.000142731] Result: 344423158480189
day06/1 [      00.000229629] Result: 4076006202939
day06/2 [      00.000279552] Result: 7903168391557
day07/1 [      00.000204422] Result: 1622
day07/2 [      00.000283816] Result: 10357305916520
day08/1 [      00.029427421] Result: 84968
day08/2 [      00.028089859] Result: 8663467782
day09/1 [      00.000310304] Result: 4764078684
day09/2 [      00.015512554] Result: 1652344888
day10/1 [      00.000796663] Result: 375
day10/2 [      --.---------] Result: 15377 (Z3)
day11/1 [      00.000416804] Result: 753
day11/2 [      00.000660528] Result: 450854305019580
day12/1 [      00.000336081] Result: 577
day12/2 [      00.000000695] Result: no part 2

A little under 90 ms total.

On my Samsung NC10 netbook from 2011 with its Intel Atom N455 at 1.6 GHz:

day01/1 [      00.003771326] Result: 1066
day01/2 [      00.003267317] Result: 6223
day02/1 [      00.003902698] Result: 12586854255
day02/2 [      00.006659479] Result: 17298174201
day03/1 [      00.000747544] Result: 17405
day03/2 [      00.002737587] Result: 171990312704598
day04/1 [      00.001263892] Result: 1626
day04/2 [      00.044985301] Result: 9173
day05/1 [      00.001696761] Result: 505
day05/2 [      00.000978962] Result: 344423158480189
day06/1 [      00.001387660] Result: 4076006202939
day06/2 [      00.001734248] Result: 7903168391557
day07/1 [      00.001295528] Result: 1622
day07/2 [      00.001809659] Result: 10357305916520
day08/1 [      00.277251443] Result: 84968
day08/2 [      00.284359332] Result: 8663467782
day09/1 [      00.003152407] Result: 4764078684
day09/2 [      00.071123459] Result: 1652344888
day10/1 [      00.005279527] Result: 375
day10/2 [      --.---------] Result: 15377 (Z3)
day11/1 [      00.003273342] Result: 753
day11/2 [      00.005139719] Result: 450854305019580
day12/1 [      00.002857552] Result: 577
day12/2 [      00.000004421] Result: no part 2

A little over 700 ms total.

I like this. You get performance that’s more or less in the ballpark of C, but without the footguns.

Day 7 was pretty tough, I initially ended up implementing an exponential in both time and memory solution that I killed because it was eating all the resources on my Mac Studio, and this poor little machine only has 32GB of memory (I stopped it at 118GB of memory, swapping badly!), This is what I ended up doing before/after:

• Before: Time O(2^k · L), memory O(2^k), where k is the number of splitters along a reachable path and L is path length. Exponential in k.
  
• After: Time O(R·C) (or O(R·C + s) with s split events), memory O©, where R = rows, C = columns. Polynomial/linear in grid size.

Awk to take lines from Plan 9’s /lib/unicode and prepend the actual glyph and a tab: awk ‘{cmd=sprintf(“unicode %s”, $1); cmd | getline c; printf(“%s %s\n”, c, $0)}’

Glibc Now Enabling 2MB THP On AArch64 By Default For Better Performance
The GNU C Library’s malloc implementation is now enabling 2MB Transparent Huge Pages (THP) by default for AArch64 Linux. This is being done in the name of better performance – a healthy 6.25% performance improvement is noted for SPEC with this change… ⌘ Read more

Turbostat Introduces New Cache Statistics, Nova Lake + Wildcat Lake Support
Turbostat is the Linux command-line utility for reporting CPU frequency / power / C-states and related performance / power management items namely for modern AMD and Intel processors. This CLI utility lives within the Linux kernel source tree and for Linux 6.19 has picked up a few new features… ⌘ Read more

Cold Case Inquiries Stall After Ancestry.com Revisits Policy For Users
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Since online genealogy services began operating, millions of people have sent them saliva samples in hopes of learning about their family roots and discovering far-flung relatives. These services also appeal to law enforcement authorities, who have used them to solve cold c … ⌘ Read more

2025 is the second hottest year since records began
Mean temperatures this year approached 1.5°C above the preindustrial average, making it the second hottest year after 2024 ⌘ Read more

Meson 1.10 Build System Adds OS/2 Support, Experimental C++ “import std”
Meson 1.10 is out today as the newest feature release for this popular cross-platform build system… ⌘ Read more

Extreme heat hampers children’s early learning
Children regularly exposed to temperatures over 30°C (86°F) have lower scores on literacy and numeracy tests at age 3 to 4, according to UNICEF data from six countries ⌘ Read more

1boy 1girl amy_rose ass big_penis classic_amy_rose classic_sonic clenched_teeth cloudz comic cum cum_in_pussy cum_inside cum_leaking female flat_chested hedgehog huge_cock male mammal penetration penis pussy rosy_the_rascal sega sex skirt skirt_lift smallbreasts sonic(series) sonic_cd sonic_the_hedgehog sonic_thehedgehog(series) spread_legs superbunnygt underwater underwater_sex vaginal_penetration water
1boy 1girl amy_rose ass big_penis classic_amy_rose classic_sonic clenched_teeth cloudz comic cum c … ⌘ Read more

Bending Spoons Buys Eventbrite For $500 Million
Longtime Slashdot reader williamyf writes: The Italian company Bending Spoons seems to be on an acquisitions spree. Their recent acquisitions of AOL and Vimeo are not yet finalized, yet on Dec. 2 they announced they are buying Eventbrite, a company specializing in publicizing and organizing local events, for just half a milliard USD. Bending Spoons’ portfolio also includes other c … ⌘ Read more

FWIW, day 03 and day 04 where solved on SuSE Linux 6.4:

https://movq.de/v/faaa3c9567/day03.jpg

https://movq.de/v/faaa3c9567/day04%2Dv3.jpg

Performance really is an issue. Anything is fast on a modern machine with modern Python. But that old stuff, oof, it takes a while … 😅

Should have used C or Java. 🤪 Well, maybe I do have to fall back on that for later puzzles. We’ll see.

Zlib-rs 0.5.3 Expands AVX-512 Usage For Faster Performance
The Trifecta Tech Foundation today released zlib-rs 0.5.3 as the newest version of this Zlib implementation written in the Rust programming language for better memory safety. Zlib-rs is advertised as “a safer Zlib” for use by both C and Rust projects while delivering competitive performance to the C-based zlib-ng… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19 Goes Ahead And Enables Microsoft C Extensions Support
Last month I reported on Linux 6.19 looking to enable Microsoft C Extensions support throughout the Linux kernel with setting the -fms-extensions compiler option to allow Microsoft C Extensions when building the kernel. Linus Torvalds today merged that support without objections… ⌘ Read more

Watch the Fun Apple Holiday 2025 Commercial: A Critter Carol
Apple has launched their official 2025 holiday advertisement for the season. This years commercial comes in at 2 minutes and features two friends taking a snowy hike, one of whom drops their iPhone into the snow, which is soon picked up by a forest creature, who proceeds to gather even more forest creatures to use … [Read More](https://osxdaily.com/2025/12/02/watch-the-fun-apple-holiday-2025-commercial-a-critter-c … ⌘ Read more

Scientists Think They’ve Solved Why One of History’s Most Advanced Civilizations Vanished
A new study published in Communications Earth & Environment has reconstructed the climate conditions of the ancient Indus River Valley civilization between 3000 and 1000 B.C., finding that four intense droughts – each lasting more than 85 years – likely drove the gradual decline of one of the w … ⌘ Read more

GCC 16 Switches To Using C++20 Standard By Default
Following up on the discussion from earlier this month among GCC developers over switching to C++20 by default for the GCC compiler as the default C++ standard when not otherwise set, that change has indeed happened. Merged now is the change defaulting to C++20 (well, the GNU++20 dialect) rather than C++17/GNU++17 when not otherwise specified when compiling C++ code… ⌘ Read more

GNU C Library Sees Up To 12.9x Improvement With New Generic FMA Implementation
Just a few days ago I wrote about the Glibc math code seeing a 4x improvement on AMD Zen by changing the used FMA implementation. Merged overnight was a new generic FMA implementation for the GNU C Library and now yielding up to a 12.9x throughput improvement on AMD Zen 3… ⌘ Read more

China’s Giant Underground Neutrino Observatory Releases Its First Results
China’s new JUNO neutrino observatory has delivered world-leading measurements after just 59 days, offering the most precise readings yet of two key neutrino oscillation parameters. “The physics result is already world-leading in the areas that it touches,” says particle physicist Juan Pedro Ochoa-Ricoux of the University of C … ⌘ Read more

Amazon Discounts USB-C AirPods Max to $399.99
Amazon today has the USB-C AirPods Max on sale for $399.99 in Starlight, down from $549.00. This is a match of the best price we’ve ever seen on the AirPods Max, and we expect more colors to match this price soon.

Image

Glibc Math Code Sees 4x Improvement On AMD Zen By Changing FMA Implementation
Merged this week to the GNU C Library “glibc” code is dropping the ldbl-96 FMA implementation from this library as in doing so they found a 4x improvement to throughput and latency on AMD Zen 3 hardware… ⌘ Read more

Fark me 🤦‍♂️ I woke up quite late today (after a long night helping/assisting with a Mainframe migration last night fork work) to abusive traffic and my alerts going off. The impact? My pod (twtxt.net) was being hammered by something at a request rate of 30 req/s (there are global rate limits in place, but still…). The culprit? Turned out to be a particular IP 43.134.51.191 and after looking into who own s that IP I discovered it was yet-another-bad-customer-or-whatever from Tencent, so that entire network (ASN) is now blocked from my Edge:

+# Who: Tentcent
+# Why: Bad Bots
+132203

Total damage?

$ caddy-log-formatter twtxt.net.log | cut -f 1 -d  ' ' | sort | uniq -c | sort -r -n -k 1 | head -n 5
  61371 43.134.51.191
    402 159.196.9.199
    121 45.77.238.240
      8 106.200.1.116
      6 104.250.53.138

61k reqs over an hour or so (before I noticed), bunch of CPU time burned, and useless waste of my fucking time.

GCC Steering Committee Allows New Language Front-End To Land For GCC 16
Joining Ada, C/C++, COBOL, D, Fortran, Go, Modula-2, Objective-C/Objective-C++ and Rust is now another programming language expected to be added for the GCC 16 compiler release due out in the new year… ⌘ Read more

Saudi Makes Big Bet On AI Films As Hollywood Moves From Studios To Datacenters
pbahra writes: Saudi Arabia is betting that the future of Hollywood won’t be built in physical stages but in datacenters. In a push to anchor itself in next-generation film production, Riyadh-based Humain has led Luma AI’s latest Series C round, backing the shift towards cloud-based, AI-generated video rather … ⌘ Read more

I had no meetings this arvo, so I made an appointment with the woods in my extended lunch break. The 6°C warm sun was out all day long and there was only a very light breeze. So, a very nice autumn day.

When I stopped to take a photo in the forest, a deer behind me took off into the woodland. I didn’t see it before. Also, I came across one or the other clearing. Sadly, it’s all commercial timberland here. Luckily, in a year or so, when nature slowly took over and reclaimed some spots, the apocalyptic sites are then looking a bit more decent again.

Cleaning of the ruin walls on my backyard mountain slowly takes shape. They made some progress and moved on to the other section. The flag on top is halfway disintegrated again, all the yellow half is completely gone. I’m wondering if they just stop replacing it at some point in time. But probably not.

Enjoy! https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2025-11-19/

Electric Vehicle Sales Are Booming In South America
Chinese automakers are rapidly expanding across South America, boosted by the new Chinese-built Port of Chancay, aggressive pricing, local partnerships, and growing regional demand. Reuters reports: China has been ramping up sales since the opening last year of the Port of Chancay, north of Lima. The Chinese-built megaport has halved trans-Pacific shipping times just as C … ⌘ Read more

vim-lsp is being confusing with C for loops. ⌘ Read more

systemd Lands Experimental Support For musl libc
Systemd today finally merged support for building against and using the musl libc library. This is a win for Linux distributions like postmarketOS, Alpine Linux, and others that use musl by default as their standard C library or offer it as an option… ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I think I now remember having similar problems back then. I’m pretty sure I typically consulted the Qt C++ documentation and only very rarely looked at the Python one. It was easy enough to translate the C++ code to Python.

Yeah, the GIL can be problematic at times. I’m glad it wasn’t an issue for my application.

FTR, I see one (two) issues with PyQt6, sadly:

1. The PyQt6 docs appear to be mostly auto-generated from the C++ docs. And they contain many errors or broken examples (due to the auto-conversion). I found this relatively unpleasent to work with.
   
2. (Until Python finally gets rid of the Global Interpreter Lock properly, it’s not really suited for GUI programs anyway – in my opinion. You can’t offload anything to a second thread, because the whole program is still single-threaded. This would have made my fractal rendering program impossible, for example.)

Could C# Overtake Java in TIOBE’s Programming Language Popularity Rankings?
It’s been trying to measure the popularity of programming languages since 2000 using metrics like the number of engineers, courses, and third-party vendors. And “The November 2025 TIOBE Index brings another twist below Python’s familiar lead,” writes TechRepublic. “C solidifies its position as runner-up, C++ and Java lose … ⌘ Read more

Slovensko bez hraníc č. 8
Úrad pre Slovákov žijúcich v zahraničí (ÚSŽZ) predstavil nové, novembrové vydanie spravodajcu Slovensko bez hraníc, ktoré prináša aktuálne informácie o činnosti úradu, významných udalostiach a aktivitách krajanov na všetkých kontinentoch. Najnovšie číslo (8/2025) je dostupné vo formáte pdf na webovej stránke ÚSŽZ. ⌘ Read more

GNU C Library Adds Linux “mseal” Function For Memory Sealing
Introduced last year in the Linux 6.10 kernel was the mseal system call for memory sealing to protect the memory mapping against modifications to seal non-writable memory segments or better protecting sensitive data structures. The GNU C Library has finally introduced its mseal function making use of this modern Linux kernel functionality… ⌘ Read more

GCC Compiler Developers Begin Considering C++20 Default
Compiler engineer Marek Polacek of Red Hat recently proposed making the C++20 language specification (or rather the GNU++20 dialect) the default C++ version when not otherwise specified… ⌘ Read more

Parsing Integers in C
Comments ⌘ Read more