Learning Rust is… an experience. An emotional journey. I’ve rarely been more frustrated than in my first few months of trying to learn Rust.

What makes it worse is that it doesn’t matter how much prior experience you have, in Java, C#, C or C++ or otherwise - it’ll still be unnerving.

In fact, more experience probably makes it worse! The habits have settled in deeper, and there’s a certain expectation that, by now, you should be able to get that done in a shorter amount of time.

I’ll keep updating this article as I go, just to put stuff in all the same place.

Platforms

Cross-compiling for Linux

I’m pretty sure it’s possible to cross-compile for Linux on other OSes, seeing as everything is open-source, but I have never done it - and why would I want to? Linux is the friendliest to build on, so it’s better to use it as a build environment.

There are news!

Here are all the changes I’m implementing, summarized as a table:

Another day, another Advent of Code 2020 problem.

That one seems fun! For some nerdy values of fun.

Our input is a set of rules:

light red bags contain 1 bright white bag, 2 muted yellow bags. dark orange bags contain 3 bright white bags, 4 muted yellow bags. bright white bags contain 1 shiny gold bag. muted yellow bags contain 2 shiny gold bags, 9 faded blue bags. shiny gold bags contain 1 dark olive bag, 2 vibrant plum bags. dark olive bags contain 3 faded blue bags, 4 dotted black bags. vibrant plum bags contain 5 faded blue bags, 6 dotted black bags. faded blue bags contain no other bags. dotted black bags contain no other bags.

Remember the snapshot we made allll the way back in Part 1? Now’s the time to use it.

Well, make sure you’ve committed and pushed all your changes, but when you’re ready, let’s go back in time to before we installed anything catscii-specific in our VM.

This should emulate the experience of a colleague onboarding onto the project well enough!

(I didn’t actually use VirtualBox’s snapshot feature for this, I actually set up a Ubuntu 22.10 VM on another computer entirely, but the effect should be much the same).

In the previous article, I gave brummi a go. However, we’ve seen that it still doesn’t fit our requirements: we need a tool that’s fast, easy to install and configure, produces beautiful and usable docs.

Yesterday I started building my own documentation generator, and in this series I’ll present the challenges I face and how I solved them. This might show a few ooc tricks, perhaps some software design, some good, some bad, but overall I hope it’ll be a good read!

Unfortunately, the ooc language could have better documentation. In the meantime, I’d like to blog about about some features that might not be very well-known.

Nested functions

Here’s a program that prints 1, 3, 5, 7, 9:

import structs/ArrayList main: func { list := ArrayList<Int> new() addIfOdd := func (i: Int) { if (i % 2 != 0) list add(i) } for (i in 0..10) { addIfOdd(i) } list map(|i| i toString()) join(", ") println() }

Being creative is hard work, let’s go optimizing instead! My graphics engine dye was pretty naive about displaying text, and it was wasteful. Let’s see how I made it all better with this one weird tip.

Disclaimer: Even after a few years I’m still very much an OpenGL newbie. Please don’t hit me with crowbars.

Once upon a time, OpenGL was easy to use - and also falling out of relevancy as far as high-performance 3D graphics were concerned. But it wasn’t all bad! You could basically pick up any library out there and integrate it with your existing GL project. Not that it’s a good idea, but it usually just worked.

What’s next? Well… poppler is the library Inkscape uses to import PDFs.

Turns out, poppler comes with a bunch of CLI tools, including pdftocairo!