fidzu : debian

Anyone who's read "bro-coder" C from before that was a name will recognize this idiom:

    var_t1_2 = 0x7F;
    ...
    do {
        ...
        var_t1_2 -= 1;
    } while (var_t1_2 >= 0);

Why does the loop count backwards? It's because comparison with zero is cheaper on some (many) platforms. Some people would reverse the loop manually, but compilers quickly managed to do that themselves. So you want:

   for (i = 0; i < 0x80; ++i) {
      ...
   }

and tomorrow, we'll have a look at what's inside the loop as well.

16 Oct 2026 8:45pm GMT

A brand new release 0.1.17 of the RcppSimdJson package is now on CRAN, and has been built for r2u and on r-universe.

RcppSimdJson wraps the fantastic and genuinely impressive simdjson library by Daniel Lemire and collaborators. Via very clever algorithmic engineering to obtain largely branch-free code, coupled with modern C++ and newer compiler instructions, it results in parsing gigabytes of JSON parsed per second which is quite mindboggling. The best-case performance is 'faster than CPU speed' as use of parallel SIMD instructions and careful branch avoidance can lead to less than one cpu cycle per byte parsed; see the video of the talk by Daniel Lemire at QCon.

This release is a small increment relative to the 0.1.6 release last week that got us (upstream) version 5.0.2 with many notable changes and sizeable speed gains on all fronts, including the interface from R. However, this failed to compile at CRAN on macOS x86_64 as the machine is setup for only partial support of C++20: no ranges, no concepts. So we now test, and fall back to C++17 if the test compilation fails. Upstream, meanwhile, already got to 5.0.5 which is included. It also gets us improved handling of disabling pragmas which we hope will survive CRAN checks.

The brief NEWS entry for this release follows.

Changes in version 0.1.17 [unreleased] (2026-10-xx)

• Compilation starts with a C++20 feature test; if this fails C++17 is used (Dirk in #111 fixing #110)

• simdjson was upgraded to version 5.0.5 (Daniel in #112)

Courtesy of my CRANberries, there is also a diffstat report for this release. For questions, suggestions, or issues please use the issue tracker at the GitHub repo.

This post by Dirk Eddelbuettel originated on his Thinking inside the box blog. If you like this or other open-source work I do, you can now sponsor me at GitHub.

16 Oct 2026 7:56pm GMT

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 334. This version includes the following changes:

[ Chris Lamb ]
* Fix a crash when using the latest versions of Androguard. Thanks, hc!
  (Closes: reproducible-builds/diffoscope#434)

You find out more by visiting the project homepage.

16 Oct 2026 12:00am GMT