Rainbow Gum 1.0.0 is a new BSD-licensed logging backend for Java 21+ that replaces Logback or Log4j2 under SLF4J and other facades. It's determinedly light while providing the most commonly used features for Java logging.
Read articleExternal submission: A program is free when its users control it. Today’s browser engines are so large that the freedom to study them exists only on paper. Nordstjernen is a browser engine written from scratch, small enough for one person to read, released under the GNU GPL as three browsers: Sol, Northstar and Southstar. Northstar, licensed under the GPL alone, shows where this should go.
Nobody knows everything about, well, anything. What matters is why each gap is there, what the rest of the team already covers, and whether anyone is allowed to say "I don't know."
FreshBooks Tools, from Andrew Lombardi, is a Python CLI and MCP server for FreshBooks: log time, check invoices and run reports from a terminal or by asking an assistant, with documentation that can’t drift from the code.
Proton’s CTO wrote a memo that nearly eulogized writing code by hand. Lars Faye points out that expertise comes from experience, and the memo doesn’t say where the next generation gets any. Here’s what used to teach it, and three ways to keep teaching it.
CheerpJ now supports modern Java, ships the full JDK and commits to supporting each future long-term support (LTS) release within six months of launch. A new execution backend based on WasmGC is available in preview and is expected to bring major performance gains.
The PHP2Shell story has reached the people who sign the checks in the same week it reached the people who file the patches. Are we seeing anything actually happen for once? Are people trying to row the boat instead of just rocking it?
Compute power can reproduce almost anything; it can't imagine anything. "Learn to code" pointed people at what AI is able to automate, and we should have been asking for imagination, not lines of code.
Information is only scarce when somebody makes it so, and the people who refuse to make it scarce are the ones rewarded least. They are carrying a load they can’t bear forever.
Zig keeps improving as a programming language. Unfortunately, its management increasingly seems determined to make it a bad choice for the people who actually want to use it.
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Pele, Obsidian's new Mermaid graph renderer, has no DOM dependency and no runtime dependencies, which means it runs on GraalJS on a stock JDK, as well as being a very nice drop-in replacement for client-side Mermaid.
Andrew Oram asked why programming languages rise and fall, and quoted the answer without noticing. Programming is a vocation, an art, and a job. Make any of those harder than they need to be, and your language survives exactly as long as it can't be replaced.