This Week I Learned: 2023W03

PXP - PHP

PXP is a superset on top of PHP, built in Rust. You can feel the inspiration of Typescript and Rust (Generics and Type aliases) or from Python (operator overloading). At a very early stage right now, but I will keep an eye on it.

Lua

Lua doesn’t have regexes, because the C regex engine is bigger than the whole Lua interpreter itself. Lua has a simpler alternative to regexes called patterns.

Javascript

For a long time, doing a deep copy in Javascript required external libraries. It seems like now it’s possible natively.

const someObj = {
  a: 1,
  b: ['an', 'array'],
  c: {
    d: 2,
  },
};

// introduction of the new structuredClone function
const someObj2 = structuredClone(someObj);

someObj.b.push('of', 'strings');

console.log(someObj.b); // ["an", "array", "of", "strings"]
console.log(someObj2.b); // ["an", "array"]

Available since Node 17.0, Chrome 98 and Firefox 94.

Cryptography

Picocrypt is a small tool written in Go to encrypt and decrypt files, focused on simplicity and security. It is open source (on the contrary to BitLocker) and a security audit is planned.

Git

git-sim is a Python tool to simulate visually what will happen if you launch a git command.

Looks really interesting but the installation (with manim) seems quite cumbersome, unfortunately.