I often write pieces that showcase how well Rust can work for you, and how it can let you build powerful abstractions, and prevents you from making a bunch of mistakes.

If you read something like Some mistakes Rust doesn’t catch in isolation, it could seem as if I had only nice things to say about Rust, and it’s a perfect little fantasy land where nothing ever goes wrong.

The end of Advent of Code 2020 is fast approaching, and we’re nowhere near done. Time to do Day 6!

The problem statement here is a little contrived, as uh, as the days that came before it, but that won’t stop us.

Basically, the input looks like this:

abc a b c ab ac a a a a b

Each line represents one person, and “groups of persons” are separated by blank lines.

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.

A little while ago, I wrote an article on things that can go wrong when downloading, it listed a series of reasons, from network problems to invalid content to imperfect hardware that may occur when initially installing a game.

This article discusses what methods we can use to upgrade a game to a later version, when an older version has been successfully installed.

Day 2, Day 2! Woo!

The Advent of Code 2020, Day 2 problem talks about passwords. Sounds familiar.

Basically, our input looks like this:

1-3 a: abcde 1-3 b: cdefg 2-9 c: ccccccccc

Each line contains a “password policy” and a “password”. For the first line, the policy is that the password must contain between 1 and 3 (inclusive) times the letter “a”.

Addressing the rumors

There have been rumors going around, in the Reddit thread for facet, my take on reflection in Rust, which happened a bit too early, but here we are, cat’s out of the bag, let’s talk about it!

Rumors that I, podcaster/youtuber fasterthanlime, want to kill serde, serialization / deserialization framework loved by many and which contributed greatly to Rust’s success, and I just wanted to address those rumors and say that…

As I’ve said before, I’m working on a book about lifetimes. Or maybe it’s just a long series - I haven’t decided the specifics yet. Like every one of my series/book things, it’s long, and it starts you off way in the periphery of the subject, and takes a lot of detours to get there.

In other words - it’s great if you want an adventure (which truly understanding Rust definitely is), but it’s not the best if you are currently on the puzzled end of a conversation with your neighborhood lifetime enforcer, the Rust compiler.

I do not come to you with answers today, but rather some observations and a lot of questions.

The weird glitch

Recently I was editing some video and I noticed this:

Not what the finger is pointing at — the dots.

Here are the separate layers this image is made up of: the background is a stock image I’ve licensed from Envato Elements:

Because I use it as a background image, I’ve cranked down the exposition in the Color tab:

The most popular option to decompress ZIP files from the Rust programming language is a crate simply named zip — At the time of this writing, it has 48 million downloads. It’s fully-featured, supporting various compression methods, encryption, and even supports writing zip files.

However, that’s not the crate everyone uses to read ZIP files. Some applications benefit from using asynchronous I/O, especially if they decompress archives that they download from the network.

I have obsessed about this long enough, I think it’s only fair I (and you!) get some content out of it.

When I started writing this article, I was working on my P99 CONF slides. Those slides happen to include some bits of code. And because I’m a perfectionist, I would like this code to be syntax highlighted, like this:

let addr: SocketAddr = config? ln = addr? config