I’ve been looking for this blog post everywhere, but it doesn’t exist, so I guess it’s my turn to write about Some Fun with Rust.

The task at hand

Let’s say you have a recursive, acyclic data structure, like so:

struct Node { values: Vec<i32>, children: Vec<Node>, }

This allows you to represent a tree-like structure:

[1, 2, 3] /\ / \ / \ / \ / \ [4, 5] [6, 7]

In the last article, we managed to load a program (hello-dl) that uses a single dynamic library (libmsg.so) containing a single exported symbol, msg.

Our program, hello-dl.asm, looked like this:

global _start extern msg section .text _start: mov rdi, 1 ; stdout fd mov rsi, msg mov rdx, 38 ; 37 chars + newline mov rax, 1 ; write syscall syscall xor rdi, rdi ; return code 0 mov rax, 60 ; exit syscall syscall

Time for another day of Advent of Code 2020.

For Day 5, we’re going to have to do…

So there’s an airline that uses binary space partitioning when referring to seats - there’s 128 rows and 8 columns. The first 7 characters are either F (Front, for the lower half) and B (back, for the upper half), and the last 3 are L (Left, for the lower half) or R (Right, for the upper half).

The day 13 puzzle needs a speech therapist.

…because it has an awful lisp!! Ahhhahahahhhh

No but seriously we have what are ostensibly S-expressions, except they use JSON-adjacent notation:

[1,1,3,1,1] [1,1,5,1,1] [[1],[2,3,4]] [[1],4] [9] [[8,7,6]] [[4,4],4,4] [[4,4],4,4,4] [7,7,7,7] [7,7,7] [] [3] [[[]]] [[]] [1,[2,[3,[4,[5,6,7]]]],8,9] [1,[2,[3,[4,[5,6,0]]]],8,9]

Against all odds, it looks like the year 2020 will actually come to an end - in less than a day now. I know! Hard to believe for me too.

A lot of things have happened for me personally, and professionally. It’s been a big year in many ways, and I feel like, to get some closure, I need to highlight some of them.

From “looking at graphs” to “driving to the hospital”

Part 1

I’m not sure where the day 3 challenge is going, because the problem statement for the first part is kinda convoluted.

As usual we have an input, like this:

vJrwpWtwJgWrhcsFMMfFFhFp jqHRNqRjqzjGDLGLrsFMfFZSrLrFZsSL PmmdzqPrVvPwwTWBwg wMqvLMZHhHMvwLHjbvcjnnSBnvTQFn ttgJtRGJQctTZtZT CrZsJsPPZsGzwwsLwLmpwMDw

Each line represents the contents of a “rucksack”, divided in two halves (which are called “compartments”), so for line 1:

A little less than two months after the previous release, I’m happy to announce that the ooc compiler rock 0.9.8, codename columbia is now out.

The impatients can readily skip to the release notes, but for those who prefer a narrative, let me tell you why I’m excited about this release.

String interpolation

We’ve thrown around this idea a lot since the early versions of rock since we have a few rubyists in our ranks, but only recently Alexandros Naskos took matters into his own hands and just implemented the fuck out of it.

I don’t mean to complain. Doing software engineering for a living is a situation of extreme privilege. But there’s something to be said about how alienating it can be at times.

Once, just once, I want to be able to answer someone’s “what are you working on?” question with “see that house? it wasn’t there last year. I built that”.

Instead for now, I have to answer with: “well you see… support for proc macros was broken in rust-analyzer for folks who used a nightly rustc toolchain, due to incompatibilities in the bridge (which is an unstable interface in the first place), and it’s bound to stay broken for the foreseeable future, not specifically because of technical challenges, but mostly because of human and organizational challenges, and I think I’ve found a way forward that will benefit everyone.”

Update: Lestac is now available in Early Access on itch.io! Read more on the official page

So, Lestac is out! Ain’t that something? For those who don’t know, it’s Sylvain and I’s entry for Ludum Dare 28, a video game jam that happens every four months.

Here’s how it looks:

You can play it now if you haven’t yet - it’s available for Linux, OS/X, and Windows. And then you can come back and read this postmortem if you will!

Now that my website is deployed as a container image, I wanted to give nix a try. I’m still doing it the old-fashioned way right now: with a Dockerfile, running cargo in a “builder” image, copying stuff out of there into a slimmer image (that still has an Ubuntu base, even though distroless images are a thing now).

But why?

I was mostly interested in nix because some parts of my website have pretty big native dependencies. futile itself mostly relies on sqlite3 and some JS engine (used to be quickjs, currently duktape because MSVC Windows builds). But the asset processing pipeline, salvage (which I’d like to integrate with futile at some point) has a bunch more!