Good morning! It is still 2020, and the world is literally on fire, so I guess we could all use a distraction.

This article continues the tradition of me getting shamelessly nerd-sniped - once by Pascal about small strings, then again by a twitch viewer about Rust enum sizes.

During a recent Rust Q&A Session on my twitch channel, someone asked a question that seemed simple: why are small string types, like SmartString or SmolStr, the same size as String, but small vec types, like SmallVec, are larger than Vec?

Learning Rust is... an experience. An emotional journey. I've rarely been more frustrated than in my first few months of trying to learn Rust.

As I've said before, I'm working on a book about lifetimes. Or maybe it's just a long series - I haven't decided the specifics yet. Like every one of my series/book things, it's long, and it starts you off way in the periphery of the subject, and takes a lot of detours to get there.

I used to be afraid of async Rust. It's easy to get into trouble!

But thanks to the work done by the whole community, async Rust is getting easier to use every week. One project I think is doing particularly great work in this area is async-std.

So!

I have no shortage of ongoing writing projects - I still need to edit and publish the final parts of making our own executable packer, and I've recently announced I was working on a Rust book/series. Those are still both on the table.

I write a ton of articles about rust. And in those articles, the main focus is about writing Rust code that compiles. Once it compiles, well, we're basically in the clear! Especially if it compiles to a single executable, that's made up entirely of Rust code.

I started experimenting with asynchronous Rust code back when futures 0.1 was all we had - before async/await. I was a Rust baby then (I'm at least a toddler now), so I quickly drowned in a sea of .and_then, .map_err and Either<A, B>.

Hey everyone!

This article is brought to you by a shameless nerd snipe, courtesy of Pascal.

In case you've blocked Twitter for your own good, this reads:

Hey internet! So, someone broke into some of my accounts.

I'm taking entire responsibility for this - there's the part where I fucked up, and if I didn't fuck up, then none of this would've happened.