In 2014 a 174-line PHP shim was written to reproduce pecl_http’s http_build_url() so AOL’s CMS could upgrade from PHP 5.2 to 5.3 without changing dozens of call sites. Published on Packagist as a temporary convenience, it unexpectedly spread: nearly 20 million total installs and about 401,000 in the last 30 days, with daily downloads climbing to roughly 13,000 by 2026. The shim is bundled inside major projects - WPML includes it and reaches over 1.5 million sites, idna-convert and SPIP ship it, and it appears in Debian and Ubuntu packages - so it likely runs on many public websites despite its humble origin.
Upon revisiting the package, a longstanding bug was discovered: a hack that tacks an “a” onto paths to preserve trailing-segment logic ends up stripping every “a” from some paths. After failed attempts years earlier to hand the package off and personal interruptions, the decision was to deprecate rather than maintain or transfer it. The author points users to mature alternatives - PHP League’s URI library and PHP 8.5’s built-in URI API - and cites security risks in transferring stewardship of a widely installed package. The package will remain installable but will receive no further fixes; the README documents migration steps.
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OpenSpec is an open-source framework that helps teams create, manage, and validate software specifications, ensuring they build the right thing and build it right. It is widely adopted, with 68,000 GitHub stars and a new spec generated every two seconds, used by over 265,000 developers monthly. (openspec.dev)
Linters and structured tools should be developed before deploying non-deterministic language models to ensure consistent and reliable output. These tools provide the necessary framework for models to generate structured, valid content rather than relying on unpredictable generation. (cookie.engineer)
WASM2GO is an open-source project that converts WebAssembly (WASM) code into Go source code. The repository contains code, documentation, and tools to facilitate this translation process. (github.com)
Google has developed the first vectorized implementation of Quicksort, a sorting algorithm that leverages SIMD instructions for improved performance. This approach is useful for tasks like building histograms by efficiently sorting large lists of numbers. (opensource.googleblog.com)
CRAP is an acronym for Change Risk Anti-Patterns, used to describe poorly written code that developers often dismiss with colorful language. The concept has gained popularity and been integrated into various code analysis tools to identify and improve bad coding practices. (testing.googleblog.com)
Small programming tricks, such as using fuzzy search with ctrl + r or leveraging SQL features like SELECT without FROM, can significantly boost productivity. These nuggets of knowledge are simple to learn and can make everyday coding tasks more efficient. (will-keleher.com)
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