Handles are the better pointers
I’ve been pursuing articles that focus on the art of lower level programming, as part of my quest to dive back into my roots as a computer engineer. What I love about programming is not the dogmatic portion of it, like “make sure your code is DRY” (a statement dreamed up by the deranged) or “always go for 100% code coverage in unit tests.” I want to learn about the finesse and finer techniques which only artisans who care for the craft can provide.
If this is something that resonates, check out this article by game developer Andre Weissflog. Andre does a great job of setting up the problem space, and various benefits to the methods of referencing and dereferencing objects in memory.
https://floooh.github.io/2018/06/17/handles-vs-pointers.html
Most Expensive One-byte Mistake
Questioning things we take for granted is part of the fun of academia I would say (as guy who has never really been a part of the world). To some degree, that’s what this article about Null Terminated Strings does. I never really thought to question why they exist, its just one of those fundamental things in the world of programming like classes or Notepad++.
But what if Null Terminated Strings were a mistake? How does one qualify a mistake, and then quantify the monetary impact? The author of this article attempts to go through various examples of places where hardware manufacturers, compiler authors, and others had to put in extra expense or risk to accommodate the null terminated string. I wouldn’t take it too seriously and the author disclaims as much themself. However it is fun to go through critiques of what is, as I believe the mistakes of the past drive our design decisions in the future.
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=2010365
How should <selectedoption> work?
Dropdowns are an integral part of web forms and the browsing experience. The native <select> element is great, but it lacks the stylization that some brands may like in order to impart their aesthetic and design principles onto the user. Or maybe some people just think the native select is ugly.
This results in developers creating their own fake dropdowns, which are usually absolutely positioned elements inserted as the first child of the <body> element. However the quantity of considerations are usually a lot for developers. Don’t believe me? Watch So You Think You Can Build a Dropdown? by Pedro Duarte, the co-creator of Radix UI. Due to this enormous headache, browsers are standardizing on a stylized <select> element.
Of course, this comes with its own challenges! In this article Jake Archibald takes a stab at the different ways that the <selectedoption> element may work, and the pros and cons to each approach.
https://jakearchibald.com/2024/how-should-selectedoption-work/