Sometimes when working on a branch, you end up with a “wip” or “fixup” commit that contains changes to several files:

01a25e6 introduce raccoon library
bd197ac modify core to use raccoon
02890e3 add --raccoon option to the CLI
f938740 fixes
fab9379 add documentation on raccoon features

Our f938740 fixes commit has changes that really belong in the three previous commits. Before merging, we want to squash those changes in the original commits where the correct code should have been in the first place.

The typical way to do this is to use interactive rebase, using git rebase -i.

This is not a post explaining interactive rebase, so check out some other sources before proceeding if you are not familiar with it!

Splitting things from a “fixup” commit can get tedious using git rebase -i in conjunction with the edit option and git add -p, especially when you really know that all changes to a file belong to a certain commit.

Here’s a quick script for the rescue: it is designed to be used during an interactive rebase, and splits the current commit into multiple commits, one with the contents of each file:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

message="$(git log --pretty=format:'%s' -n1)"

if [ `git status --porcelain --untracked-files=no | wc -l` = 0 ]
then
   git reset --soft HEAD^
fi

git status --porcelain --untracked-files=no | while read status file
do
   echo $status $file

   if [ "$status" = "M" ]
   then
      git add $file
      git commit -n $file -m "$file: $message"
   elif [ "$status" = "A" ]
   then
      git add $file
      git commit -n $file -m "added $file: $message"
   elif [ "$status" = "D" ]
   then
      git rm $file
      git commit -n $file -m "removed $file: $message"
   else
      echo "unknown status $file"
   fi
done

Save this as split-files.sh (and make it executable with chmod +x split-files.sh).

Now, we proceed with the interactive rebase. When doing an interactive rebase, Git will open a text editor: in the commit you want to split, replace pick with edit:

pick 01a25e6 introduce raccoon library
pick bd197ac modify core to use raccoon
pick 02890e3 add --raccoon option to the CLI
edit f938740 fixes
pick fab9379 add documentation on raccoon features

# Rebase 01a25e6..fab9379 onto cb370a2 (5 commands)
#
# Commands:
# p, pick  = use commit
# r, reword  = use commit, but edit the commit message
# e, edit  = use commit, but stop for amending
# ...

When you save and exit the text editor launched by Git, you will return to the prompt with the repo's HEAD pointing at the commit we will split. Then run ./split-files.sh and then git rebase --continue.

Now launch the interactive rebase again. Your commits should look like this:

pick 01a25e6 introduce raccoon library
pick bd197ac modify core to use raccoon
pick 02890e3 add --raccoon option to the CLI
pick 8369783 src/lib/racoon.foo: fixes
pick a3c4e42 src/cli/foobar: fixes
pick 108a931 src/core/core.foo: fixes
pick fab9379 add documentation on raccoon features

# Rebase 01a25e6..fab9379 onto cb370a2 (7 commands)
#
# Commands:
# p, pick  = use commit
# r, reword  = use commit, but edit the commit message
# e, edit  = use commit, but stop for amending
# ...

The "fixes" commit in our example was split into three. Now move these new commits around and use the fixup command to merge them to the commit immediately above it:

pick 01a25e6 introduce raccoon library
fixup 8369783 src/lib/racoon.foo: fixes
pick bd197ac modify core to use raccoon
fixup 108a931 src/core/core.foo: fixes
pick 02890e3 add --raccoon option to the CLI
fixup a3c4e42 src/cli/foobar: fixes
pick fab9379 add documentation on raccoon features

# Rebase 01a25e6..fab9379 onto cb370a2 (7 commands)
#
# Commands:
# p, pick  = use commit
# r, reword  = use commit, but edit the commit message
# e, edit  = use commit, but stop for amending
# ...

Save, exit, and we're done! But a word of warning: when moving commits around make sure there are no other commits that change the same part of the file in between your "fixes" commit and the one you're squashing it into. When in doubt, Gitk and similar tools make it easier to check this before you jump into squashing commits.

If everything went well, our history now looks like this:

8370e83 introduce raccoon library
038c5a3 modify core to use raccoon
bb9783a add --raccoon option to the CLI
fab9379 add documentation on raccoon features

The SHA hashes of the commits have changed, because they now contain the fixes merged into them, and the separate catch-all "fixes" commit is now gone for good!

Of course this is a bit of an ideal scenario where each file goes neatly into a separate commit. Sometimes changes made to a single file belong in separate commits. In those cases, the solution is a bit more manual, using edit and then git add -p, which is super useful.

And remember, if any moment you messed up, git reflog is your best friend! But this is a topic for another time. Cheers!

A user in the Lua mailing list recently asked the following question:

yield( splits[i-1][1]..word[i+1]..word[i]..splits[i+2][2] )

I tried table.concat and string.format, but both perform worst. This was
counter-intuitive to me, because Lua string concat generates copies of
intermediate strings. However, seems that for short strings and small number
of concatenated strings, string __concat performs better than string.format
or table.concat. Does anyone know if my observation is true?

The “folk wisdom” about copies of intermediate strings in Lua is often mis-stated, I think.

("aa"):upper() .. ("bb"):upper() .. ("cc"):upper() .. ("dd"):upper()

It translates to a single concatenation bytecode in both Lua and LuaJIT, so it produces the following strings in memory over the course of its execution:

"aa"
"bb"
"cc"
"dd"
"AA"
"BB"
"CC"
"DD"
"AABBCCDD"

This, on the other hand, does generate intermediate strings:

local s = ""
for _, w in ipairs({"aa", "bb", "cc", "dd"})
   s = s .. w:upper()
end

It produces

""
"aa"
"bb"
"cc"
"dd"
"AA"
"BB"
"CC"
"DD"
"AABB"
"AABBCC"
"AABBCCDD"

Notice the little pyramid at the end. This pattern is the one that people tell to avoid when they talk about “intermediate strings”. For a loop like that, one should do instead:

local t = {}
for _, w in ipairs({"aa", "bb", "cc", "dd"})
   table.insert(s, w:upper())
end
local s = table.concat(t)

That will produce:

"aa"
"bb"
"cc"
"dd"
"AA"
"BB"
"CC"
"DD"
"AABBCCDD"

plus an extra table. Of course this is an oversimplified example for illustration purposes, but often the loop is long and the naive approach above can produce a huge pyramid of intermediate strings.

Over the years, the sensible advice was somehow distorted into some “all string concatenation is evil” cargo-cult, but that is not true, especially for short sequences of concatenations in an expression. Using a..b..c will usually be cheaper and produce less garbage than either string.format(”%s%s%s”, a, b, c) or table.concat({a, b, c}).

I am extremely happy to announce LuaRocks 3.0.0beta1, the almost-finished package for the new major release of LuaRocks, the Lua package manager.

First of all: “Why beta1?” — the code itself is release-candidate
quality, but I decided to call this one beta1 and not rc1 because the
Windows package is not ready yet, and I wanted to get some early
feedback on the Unix build while I complete the final touches of the
Windows package.

This is NOT going to be a long-or-endless beta cycle: if no major
showstoppers are reported, the final 3.0.0 release, including Unix and
Windows packages, is expected to arrive in one week. But please, if
you want to help out with LuaRocks, give this beta1 a try and report
any findings!

Yes, it’s finally here! After a way-too-long gestation period, LuaRocks 3 is about ready to see the light of day. And it includes a lot of new stuff:

• New rockspec format
• New commands, including `luarocks init` for per-project workflows
• New flags, including `–lua-dir` and `–lua-version` for using
• multiple Lua installs with a single LuaRocks
• New build system, gearing towards a new distribution model
• General improvements, including namespaces
• User-visible changes, including some breaking changes
• Internal changes

All of the above are detailed here:

https://github.com/luarocks/luarocks/blob/master/CHANGELOG.md

I’ll try to write up more documentation between now and the final release. Feedback is wanted regarding what needs to be documented/explained! And help updating the wiki is especially welcome.

And without further ado, the tarball for Unix is here:

https://luarocks.github.io/luarocks/releases/luarocks-3.0.0beta1.tar.gz

This release contains new code by Thijs Schreijer, George Roman, Peter Melnichenko, Kim Alvefur, Alec Larson, Evgeny Shulgin, Michal Cichra, Daniel Hahler, and myself.

Very special thanks to my employer Kong, for sponsoring my work on LuaRocks over the last year and making this release possible. Thanks also to my colleagues Aapo Talvensaari and Enrique García Cota for helping out with some last-minute testing.

In the name of everyone in the LuaRocks development team, thank you for the continued amazing support that Lua community has been giving LuaRocks over the years: keep on rockin’!

Cheers!!!

Often, in code, we have to write lists of repeated things. For example, attribute initialization in Java constructors:

this.foo = foo;

or required modules in Lua:

local foo = require("foo")

There are a few different ways people stack these when they need to list a number of them: randomly, alphabetic, aligned… working on a codebase that has all these approaches in different modules, I realized that “pyramid” is best. Let’s compare a few examples:

Random

This is what you end up doing if you don’t really think about it:

this.medium = medium;
this.aLongOne = aLongOne;
this.foo = foo;
this.veryLongOne = veryLongOne;
this.short = short;

⊖ ⊖ very bad to read - your eyes move back and forth horizontally and need to scan the whole thing vertically
⊕ easy to maintain - just add or remove entries arbitrarily

Alphabetical

This is what you end up doing if you get annoyed about the order when writing. I did this for a while.

this.aLongOne = aLongOne;
this.foo = foo;
this.medium = medium;
this.short = short;
this.veryLongOne = veryLongOne;

⊖ bad to read - your eyes move back and forth horizontally, but it’s easy to scan vertically
⊕ easy to maintain - no question where a new entry should go

Aligned

This is what you end up doing if you start to get annoyed when reading. Readability is more important than writability, after all!

this.aLongOne    = aLongOne;
this.foo         = foo;
this.medium      = medium;
this.short       = short;
this.veryLongOne = veryLongOne;

⊕ ⊕ very easy to read easy on the eyes horizontally, and if alphabetical it’s easy vertically as well
⊖ ⊖ very bad to maintain terrible for diffs, changes mess up `git blame` for unrelated lines

Pyramid

Finally, we get to the pyramid, which seems an ideal compromise keeping the advantages of an aligned list while avoiding its drawbacks:

this.veryLongOne = veryLongOne;
this.aLongOne = aLongOne;
this.medium = medium;
this.short = short;
this.foo = foo;

⊕ easy to read - easy on the eyes horizontally as the eyes follow the diagonal, and easy vertically as well as you usually know if you’re looking for a long or short word
⊕ easy to maintain - no question where entries go; you can use alphabetical order as a tie breaker for entries of same length

You can of course do the pyramid “ascending” or “descending”. I don’t really have a preference (and I couldn’t find any practical advantages to either yet).

In conclusion, it’s a silly little thing, but something that improves the ergonomics of the code and which I’ll try to adopt in my code more consistently from now on.

(PS: Of course, all of this applies to lists where the entries are not semantically related: when listing color components one would always do “red, green, blue”, and not “green, blue, red” :) )

I won’t deny it. I came up with the title for this post before coming up with the actual content. It came to my head and it was just too good to pass, because it entices you to think about that subject. What does every programmer need to know, after all?

• 
  What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic
• What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory
• What every computer science major should know
• What every programmer absolutely, positively needs to know about encodings and character sets to work with text
• The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)
• What Every Programmer Needs To Know About Game Networking
• What every programmer should know about time (the blog post is simply called “Time”, but it was featured in Hacker News with the long title)

What every programmer should know about names (actually titled “Falsehoods Programmers Believe About Names” — this is about people’s names)

If you run into any other of those lists, let me know at h@ this website’s domain!