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.
Proc macro support in rust-analyzer for nightly rustc versions
I don’t mean to complain. Doing software engineering for a living is a situation of extreme privilege. But there’s something to be said about how alienating it can be at times.
Once, just once, I want to be able to answer someone’s “what are you working on?” question with “see that house? it wasn’t there last year. I built that”.
Instead for now, I have to answer with: “well you see… support for proc macros was broken in rust-analyzer for folks who used a nightly rustc toolchain, due to incompatibilities in the bridge (which is an unstable interface in the first place), and it’s bound to stay broken for the foreseeable future, not specifically because of technical challenges, but mostly because of human and organizational challenges, and I think I’ve found a way forward that will benefit everyone.”
When rustc explodes
One could say I have a bit of an obsession with build times.
I believe having a “tight feedback loop” is extremely valuable: when I work on a large codebase, I want to be able to make small incremental changes and check very often that things are going as expected.
Especially if I’m working on a project that needs to move quickly: say, the product for an early-stage startup, or a side-project for which I only ever get to do 1-hour work bursts at most.
Remote development with Rust on fly.io
Disclaimer:
At the time of this writing, I benefit from the fly.io “Employee Free Tier”. I don’t pay for side projects hosted there “within reasonable limits”. The project discussed here qualifies for that.
Why you might want a remote dev environment
Fearmongering aside — and Cthulhu knows there’s been a bunch, since this unfortunate tweet — there’s a bunch of reasons to want a remote dev environment.
The curse of strong typing
It happened when I least expected it.
Someone, somewhere (above me, presumably) made a decision. “From now on”, they declared, “all our new stuff must be written in Rust”.
I’m not sure where they got that idea from. Maybe they’ve been reading propaganda. Maybe they fell prey to some confident asshole, and convinced themselves that Rust was the answer to their problems.
I won free load testing
Long story short: a couple of my articles got really popular on a bunch of sites, and someone, somewhere, went “well, let’s see how much traffic that smart-ass can handle”, and suddenly I was on the receiving end of a couple DDoS attacks.
It really doesn’t matter what the articles were about — the attack is certainly not representative of how folks on either side of any number of debates generally behave.
Lies we tell ourselves to keep using Golang
In the two years since I’ve posted I want off Mr Golang’s Wild Ride, it’s made the rounds time and time again, on Reddit, on Lobste.rs, on HackerNews, and elsewhere.
And every time, it elicits the same responses:
- You talk about Windows: that’s not what Go is good at! (Also, who cares?)
- This is very one-sided: you’re not talking about the good sides of Go!
Futures Nostalgia
Up until recently, hyper was my favorite Rust HTTP framework. It’s low-level, but that gives you a lot of control over what happens.
Here’s what a sample hyper application would look like:
$ cargo new nostalgia
Created binary (application) `nostalgia` package
$ cd nostalgia
$ cargo add hyper@0.14 --features "http1 tcp server"
Updating 'https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io-index' index
Adding hyper v0.14 to dependencies with features: ["http1", "tcp", "server"]
$ cargo add tokio@1 --features "full"
Updating 'https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io-index' index
Adding tokio v1 to dependencies with features: ["full"]
Request coalescing in async Rust
As the popular saying goes, there are only two hard problems in computer science: caching, off-by-one errors, and getting a Rust job that isn’t cryptocurrency-related.
Today, we’ll discuss caching! Or rather, we’ll discuss… “request coalescing”, or “request deduplication”, or “single-flighting” - there’s many names for that concept, which we’ll get into fairly soon.