221 results for "":
Porting poppler to meson
It took a hot minute.
Try several weeks.
Well, yeah. I got to contribute to a bunch of open-source projects in the meantime though, so I’m fairly pleased with it!
- libffi (for static linking)
- cairo (more static linking!)
- proxy-libintl (more static linking!)
- expat (static linking strikes again)
- poppler (for file descriptor stuff not properly gated on Windows, closed in favor of a similar MR)
Aiming for correctness with types
The Nature weekly journal of science was first published in 1869. And after one and a half century, it has finally completed one cycle of carcinization, by publishing an article about the Rust programming language.
It’s a really good article.
What I liked about this article is that it didn’t just talk about performance, or even just memory safety - it also talked about correctness.
Catching up with async Rust
In December 2023, a minor miracle happened: async fn in traits shipped.
As of Rust 1.39, we already had free-standing async functions:
pub async fn read_hosts () -> eyre:: Result < Vec < u8 >> {
// etc.
}
…and async functions in impl blocks:
impl HostReader {
pub async fn read_hosts ( & self ) -> eyre:: Result < Vec < u8 >>
I am a Java, C#, C or C++ developer, time to do some Rust
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.
Productionizing our poppler build
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.
Some mistakes Rust doesn't catch
I still get excited about programming languages. But these days, it’s not so much because of what they let me do, but rather what they don’t let me do.
Ultimately, what you can with a programming language is seldom limited by the language itself: there’s nothing you can do in C++ that you can’t do in C, given infinite time.
As long as a language is turing-complete and compiles down to assembly, no matter the interface, it’s the same machine you’re talking to. You’re limited by… what your hardware can do, how much memory it has (and how fast it is), what kind of peripherals are plugged into it, and so on.
Deploying at the edge
Disclaimer:
Although I no longer work for the company my website is hosted on, and this article is written in way that mentions neither my previous or current hosting provider: at the time of this writing, I don’t pay for hosting.
One thing I didn’t really announce (because I wanted to make sure it worked before I did), is that I’ve migrated my website over completely from a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to an ADN (Application Delivery Network), and that required some architectural changes.
The bottom emoji breaks rust-analyzer
Some bugs are merely fun. Others are simply delicious!
Today’s pick is the latter.
Reproducing the issue, part 1
(It may be tempting to skip that section, but reproducing an issue is an important part of figuring it out, so.)
I’ve never used Emacs before, so let’s install it. I do most of my computing on an era-appropriate Ubuntu, today it’s Ubuntu 22.10, so I just need to:
Day 10 (Advent of Code 2022)
Onwards! To the day 10 puzzle.
I don’t see a way to make part 1 especially fun — so let’s just get to it.
Parsing
As usual, let’s reach for the nom crate…
$ cargo add nom@7
(cut)
…to parse the input into nicely-organized Rust data structures:
// in `src/main.rs`
use nom::{
branch:: alt,
bytes:: complete:: tag,
combinator::{ map value
sequencepreceded
->
noop =
addx = nomcharactercompletei32
noop addx i
->
=>
_ =>
Day 8 (Advent of Code 2022)
In the day 8 problem, our input is a height map:
30373
25512
65332
33549
35390
This is a 5x5 grid, and every number denotes the height of a tree. For part 1, we must find out how many trees are visible from the outside of the grid.
If we consider the first row, from the left: only the 3 is visible: it
obscures the 0. From the right, 3 and 7 are visible.