The year is drawing to a close, and I’m going off on a much-needed holiday next week. This seems like a good time to look back at the past twelve months!

I can’t believe that shipped

2018 was the year of foundational work. As far as “work work” is concerned, I spent the first 9 months finishing up my largest project ever, the itch v25 rewrite.

Async fn in trait… not

I was planning on showing the in-progress async_fn_in_trait feature in the context of my website, but it turns out, I can’t!

My website uses two databases: one local SQLite database for content, and a shared Postgres database for user credentials, preferences etc. Migrations are run on startup, and each migration implements one of the following traits:

In our last installment of “Making our own executable packer”, we did some code cleanups. We got rid of a bunch of unsafe code, and found a way to represent memory-mapped data structures safely.

But that article was merely a break in our otherwise colorful saga of “trying to get as many executables to run with our own dynamic loader”. The last thing we got running was the ifunc-nolibc program.

Executables have been fascinating to me ever since I discovered, as a kid, that they were just files. If you renamed a .exe to something else, you could open it in notepad! And if you renamed something else to a .exe, you’d get a neat error dialog.

Clearly, something was different about these files. Seen from notepad, they were mostly gibberish, but there had to be order in that chaos. 12-year-old me knew that, although he didn’t quite know how or where to dig to make sense of it all.

This is going to be a short one.

Basically, since February, both shamanas, fredreichbier and I have putting way too much work into the latest iteration of rock, an ooc compiler written in ooc.

I have the pleasure to announce that version 0.9.7, codename pacino is now out, as you can plainly see on the new website: https://ooc-lang.github.io

You can read the release notes to learn what has changed, but basically expect a lot of fixes, some new APIs, and awesome backtraces.

The front end of the pool

I’ve been interested in reactive JavaScript for a while. At memoways, we strive to build snappy user interfaces for clients who like to interact with their data with as little latency as possible.

In the past two years, I learned front-end development on-the-fly, as the needs of the clients required it. Two years ago, I was still using jQuery. Then, I discovered space-pen thanks to my colleague Nicolas. It was nice to have proper ‘view’ objects, and use jQuery’s event system to have messages propagate throughout a hierarchy.

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.

In our last article, we managed to load and execute a PIE (position-independent executable) compiled from the following code:

; in `samples/hello-pie.asm` global _start section .text _start: mov rdi, 1 ; stdout fd lea rsi, [rel msg] mov rdx, 9 ; 8 chars + newline mov rax, 1 ; write syscall , , "hi there", 10

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.

So! Rust futures! Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Until it’s not. So let’s do the easy thing, and then instead of waiting for the hard thing to sneak up on us, we’ll go for it intentionally.

Cool Bear's hot tip

That’s all-around solid life advice.

Choo choo here comes the easy part 🚂💨

We make a new project:

$ cargo new waytoodeep Created binary (application) `waytoodeep` package