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I won free load testing

May 02, 2022

29 min #ddos · #cloudflare · #postmortem · #rust

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.

Small strings in Rust

Jul 05, 2020

17 min #rust

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

Peeking inside a Rust enum

Aug 28, 2020

53 min #rust · #c · #memory

During a recent Rust Q&A Session on my twitch channel, someone asked a question that seemed simple: why are small string types, like SmartString or SmolStr, the same size as String, but small vec types, like SmallVec, are larger than Vec?

Now I know I just used the adjective simple, but the truth of the matter is: to understand the question, we’re going to need a little bit of background.

Productionizing our poppler build

Dec 31, 2021

19 min #rust · #build-systems · #meson · #ftl-infra

I was a bit anxious about running our poppler meson build in CI, because it’s the real test, you know? “Works on my machine” only goes so far, things have a tendency to break once you try to make them reproducible.

And I was right to worry… but not for the reasons I thought. As I tried to get everything to build in CI, there was a Pypi maintenance that prevented me from installing meson, and then Sourceforge was acting up.

A terminal case of Linux

Sep 24, 2021

29 min #rust · #linux

Has this ever happened to you?

You want to look at a JSON file in your terminal, so you pipe it into jq so you can look at it with colors and stuff.

Cool Bear's hot tip

That’s a useless use of cat.

…oh hey cool bear. No warm-up today huh.

Sure, fine, okay, I’ll read the darn man page for jq… okay it takes a “filter” and then some files. And the filter we want is.. . which, just like files, means “the current thing”:

Highlighted code in slides

Nov 23, 2024

15 min #html · #css · #javascript · #color

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

Profiling linkers

Jan 03, 2022

6 min #rust · #release-engineering

In the wake of Why is my Rust build so slow?, developers from the mold and lld linkers reached out, wondering why using their linker didn’t make a big difference.

Of course the answer was “there’s just not that much linking to do”, and so any difference between mold and lld was within a second. GNU ld was lagging way behind, at four seconds or so.

Parsing IPv4 packets, including numbers smaller than bytes

Nov 21, 2019

21 min #networking · #icmp · #rust · #ip · #parsing

Hello and welcome to Part 11 of this series, wherein we finally use some of the code I prototyped way back when I was planning this series.

Where are we standing?

Let’s review the progress we’ve made in the first 10 parts: first, we’ve started thinking about what it takes for computers to communicate. Then, we’ve followed a rough outline of the various standards and protocols that have emerged since the 1970s.

GDB scripting and Indirect functions

Feb 27, 2020

41 min #rust · #gdb · #nom

In the last article, we cleaned up our dynamic linker a little. We even implemented the Dynamic relocation.

But it’s still pretty far away from running real-world applications.

Let’s try running a simple C application with it:



// in `samples/puts.c`

#include <stdio.h>

int main() {
    puts("Hello from C");
    return 0;
}



$ cd samples/
$ gcc puts.c -o puts
$ ../target/debug/elk ./puts
Loading "/home/amos/ftl/elk/samples/puts"
Loading "/usr/lib/libc-2.32.so"
Fatal error: Could not read symbols from ELF object: Parsing error: String("Unknown SymType 10 (0xa)"):
input: 1a 00 10 00 a0 bf 0b 00 00 00 00 00 c1 00 00 00 00 00 00 00

Declarative memory management

Sep 19, 2019

35 min #rust · #memory

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 benefits, rather than as an opponent to fend with.