Articles

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!

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 . In 2018, I released a postmortem for v25 (which I then deleted).

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.

It is unreasonable going forward to expect the same handful of companies to provide all the funding.

Once upon a time, @Cinememer wrote some alternative lyrics to "Under The Sea". I couldn't resist singing them!

I unfortunately lost the audio files for this. Oh well.

• Instrumental (Neverland Orchestra)

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 , rather than as an opponent to fend with.

Let's play a game: your objective is to guess a word, but you can only ask yes or no questions. You should also aim to ask as few questions as possible.

You might have played a variant of this game before, guessing famous actors or musicians. You'd usually ask questions like "Are they alive?", or "Have they won an Oscar"? And that would allow you to narrow down the possibilities, until you finally resort to a list of direct guesses ("Is it Amy Adams?") or simply give up.

Hey all, thanks for checking in!

After much soul searching, I have arrived to the following conclusion:

• Teaching folks about stuff is my jam.

I've been writing multiple articles that sort of read like course material, if there was no dress code, maybe?

In 2013, I organized a 1st year Computer Science student project. Instead of making them implement "control tower software" for a fictional airline, I decided to go for something real - the BitTorrent protocol.

A while back, I asked on Twitter what people found confusing in Rust, and one of the top topics was "how the module system maps to files".

I remember struggling with that a lot when I first started Rust, so I'll try to explain it in a way that makes sense to me.

All that follows is written for Rust 2021 edition. I have no interest in learning (or teaching) the ins and outs of the previous version, especially because it was a lot more confusing to me.