RDAP is the new whois

You may see the message on websites "Use of the RDAP service is limited to lawful business purposes only". RDAP is the Registration Data Access Protocol developed by the IETF as the successor to whois.

Key difference: whois returns free text, RDAP returns JSON, making it machine readable and easier to automate. It also supports RESTful web services, allowing for HTTP based queries, error codes, authentication and access control.

RDAP also supports Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs), which are domain names utilizing non-Latin characters. Languages can include Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic or Devanagari. As DNS is limited to ASCII characters, an ASCII encoding called Punycode (deliberately designed to rhyme with Unicode) is used for name translation.

C++ 26

The new C++ is C++ 26.  It has been effusively promoted by Herb Sutter.  A lot of new features have already been implemented in gcc - MSVC and Intel C++ need to catch up.

Profiles in C++

Profiles are a relatively new concept from the C++ Core Guidelines.

Their aim is to improve code safety, portability and maintainability.

Profiles are (portably) enforceable rules to achieve a specific guarantee. For example a Bounds Safety profile would force the compiler or static analyzer to flag the following:

int arr[5];

arr[10] = 42;  // out of bounds access - flagged by profile

A presentation by Stroustrup at a Safety Study Group explores this. Herb Sutter also published an interesting paper which refers to levelling up versus Rust.

What is a WEBP file?

WEBP is a file image format created by Google (introduced in 2010) providing both lossy and lossless compression, usually producing much smaller file sizes than JPEG or PNG while keeping similar visual quality. 

WEBP is based on the RIFF (the famous Resource Interchange File Format) container structure.

Decline of Computer Magazines in the US

Nicely summarised here.

Visual Studio 2026

Visual Studio 2026 is now out. Previous versions are no longer supported.

C/C++ on VS Code

You can edit C/C++ code in VS Code but you need the C/C++ Extension Pack for more features.