When I get a little bit too emotional about my current baby, the itch.io app, there’s always a timely support ticket reminding me that it is currently, still a glorified game downloader.

However true that is, that doesn’t mean it’s easy! In the past year, I’ve had to account for a bunch of failure conditions that can happen, some of which I didn’t realize were even possible. Let’s review them, for fun!

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.

So you want to do live streams. Are you sure? Okay. Let’s talk about it.

Let’s talk numbers

Being a “content creator” (sorry for those who hate that term) is a job, for sure, and many people do it, successfully, full-time, they pay rent with it etc.

Platforms like Twitch & YouTube would have you think that, if you put in enough effort, you can grow your channel from nothing to 🎉 profitable ✨ in just a few short years.

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.

Good morning! It is still 2020, and the world is literally on fire, so I guess we could all use a distraction.

This article continues the tradition of me getting shamelessly nerd-sniped - once by Pascal about small strings, then again by a twitch viewer about Rust enum sizes.

This time, Ana was handing out free nerdsnipes, so I got in line, and mine was:

I’ve been banging the same drum for years: APIs must be carefully designed.

This statement doesn’t resonate the same way with everyone. In order to really understand what I mean by “careful API design”, one has to have experienced both ends of the spectrum.

But there is a silver lining - once you have experienced “good design”, it’s really hard to go back to the other kind. Even after acknowledging that “good design” inevitably comes at a cost, whether it’s cognitive load, compile times, making hiring more challenging, etc.

Up until now, we’ve been loading a single ELF file, and there wasn’t much structure to how we did it: everyhing just kinda happened in main, in no particular order.

But now that shared libraries are in the picture, we have to load multiple ELF files, with search paths, and keep them around so we can resolve symbols, and apply relocations across different objects.

I was not planning on doing anything specific this December, but a lot of folks around me (on Twitter, at work) have chosen this Advent of Code to pick up Rust, and I’ve got big FOMO energy, so, let’s see where this goes.

I’ll be doing all of these on Linux, so there may be some command-line tools involved, but don’t worry about them - the code itself should run on all platforms no problem.

Welcome back!

In the last article, we did foundational work on minipak, our ELF packer.

It is now able to receive command-line arguments, environment variables, and auxiliary vectors. It can parse those command-line arguments into a set of options. It can make an ELF file smaller using the LZ4 compression algorithm, and pack it together with stage1, our launcher.

In the previous chapter, we’ve written a Dockerfile to build the catscii service inside Docker. The result is a container image that can be pushed to production!