Articles

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>.

But that's all in the past! I guess!

Now everything is fine, and things go smoothly. For the most part. But even with , there are still some cases where the compiler diagnostics are, just, .

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:

There should be a post explaining and comparing smolstr and smartstring (and maybe others, like smallstr)

Well, I took the bait.

But, since this is me writing, I get to set the rules:

• There will be no "maybe others" - we'll review just the first two

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.

But there's also the part where a series of design decisions from various vendors combined into the perfect storm for me.

And we're going to talk about both! Separately! And calmly.

Since I write a lot of articles about Rust, I tend to get a lot of questions about specific crates: "Amos, what do you think of oauth2-simd? Is it better than openid-sse4? I think the latter has a lot of boilerplate."

And most of the time, I'm not sure what to responds. There's a lot of crates out there. I could probably review one crate a day until I retire!

I've been banging the same drum for years: APIs must be carefully designed.

This statement doesn't resonate the same way with everyone. In order to really understand what I mean by "careful API design", one has to have experienced both ends of the spectrum.

But there is a silver lining - once you have experienced "good design", it's really hard to go back to the other kind. Even after acknowledging that "good design" inevitably comes at a cost, whether it's cognitive load, compile times, making hiring more challenging, etc.

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.

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.

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.

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.