Articles
Articles are single-page pieces that give a whirlwind tour of a specific topic.
They’re different from series, which go very in-depth, taking many detours.
A new website for 2020
Hi everyone. Has it been two months since I last posted something? Yes it has!
That seems like a nice round duration, so let’s break the silence with a few announcements.
I have a new website
If everything goes well, you’re on it right now.
Does it feel okay? Take a minute to accustom yourself to your new surroundings. Identify potential sources of fresh water. Gather some supplies with which to fashion a makeshift shelter.
I want off Mr. Golang's Wild Ride
My honeymoon with the Go language is extremely over.
This article is going to have a different tone from what I’ve been posting the past year - it’s a proper rant. And I always feel bad writing those, because, inevitably, it discusses things a lot of people have been working very hard on.
In spite of that, here we are.
Having invested thousands of hours into the language, and implemented several critical (to my employer) pieces of infrastructure with it, I wish I hadn’t.
Working with strings in Rust
There’s a question that always comes up when people pick up the
Rust programming language: why are there two
string types? Why is there String, and &str?
My Declarative Memory Management article answers the question partially, but there is a lot more to say about it, so let’s run a few experiments and see if we can conjure up a thorough defense of Rust’s approach over, say, C’s.
A half-hour to learn Rust
In order to increase fluency in a programming language, one has to read a lot of it.
But how can you read a lot of it if you don’t know what it means?
In this article, instead of focusing on one or two concepts, I’ll try to go through as many Rust snippets as I can, and explain what the keywords and symbols they contain mean.
Ready? Go!
Variable bindings
The many rewrites of the itch.io desktop app
I started working on the itch.io desktop app over 4 years ago.
It has arguably been my main project ever since, along with companion projects like butler, capsule and many smaller libraries.
I’m fuzzy on the initial history, but I remember the codebase went through a lot of changes. As early as 2014, the whole codebase was ported from vanilla JavaScript to TypeScript. In 2016, I released a timeline of all the changes. In 2018, I released a postmortem for v25 (which I then deleted).
Rust 2020: Funding
Blog posts that praise Rust are many but funding is generally in short supply.
If even a small percentage of the money Rust saves companies was put back into the ecosystem it would help secure the future of the platform tremendously.
Multiple sources of funding
It is unreasonable going forward to expect the same handful of companies to provide all the funding.
Declarative memory management
It feels like an eternity since I’ve started using Rust, and yet I remember vividly what it felt like to bang my head against the borrow checker for the first few times.
I’m definitely not alone in that, and there’s been quite a few articles on the subject! But I want to take some time to present the borrow checker from the perspective of its benefits, rather than as an opponent to fend with.