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Reading files the hard way

Aug 31, 2019

1 hour 6 min #os · #rust

Everybody knows how to use files. You just open up File Explorer, the Finder, or a File Manager, and bam - it’s chock-full of files. There’s folders and files as far as the eye can see. It’s a genuine filapalooza. I have never once heard someone complain there were not enough files on their computer.

But what is a file, really? And what does reading a file entail, exactly?

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.

Between libcore and libstd

Feb 21, 2021

35 min #os · #assembly · #linux · #rust · #elf

You’re still here! Fantastic.

I have good news, and bad news. The good news is, we’re actually going to make an executable packer now!

Hurray!

I know right? No lie, we’re actually really going to start working on the final product from this point onwards.

What uhhh what about the previous fourteen parts?

Ah, yes, the previous fourteen parts. Well, we had fun, didn’t we? And we learned a lot about ELF, how it’s basically a database format that different tools look at in different ways, how it’s mapped in memory (more or less), what we really need to set up before starting up another executable, all that good stuff.

Remote development with Rust on fly.io

Jun 20, 2022

43 min #rust · #tokio · #io-uring · #bpf · #fly.io

Disclaimer:

At the time of this writing, I benefit from the fly.io “Employee Free Tier”. I don’t pay for side projects hosted there “within reasonable limits”. The project discussed here qualifies for that.

Why you might want a remote dev environment

Fearmongering aside — and Cthulhu knows there’s been a bunch, since this unfortunate tweet — there’s a bunch of reasons to want a remote dev environment.

FFI-safe types in Rust, newtypes and MaybeUninit

Sep 30, 2019

12 min #networking · #icmp · #win32 · #rust · #ffi

It’s time to make sup, our own take on ping, use the Win32 APIs to send an ICMP echo. Earlier we discovered that Windows’s ping.exe used IcmpSendEcho2Ex. But for our purposes, the simpler IcmpSendEcho will do just fine.

As we mentioned earlier, it’s provided by IPHLPAPI.dll, and its C declaration is:



IPHLPAPI_DLL_LINKAGE DWORD IcmpSendEcho(
                   ,
                   ,
                   ,
                     ,
   ,
                   ,
                    ,
                    
);

Face cams: the missing guide

Mar 02, 2024

1 hour 11 min #meta · #production

I try to avoid doing “meta” / “behind the scenes” stuff, because I usually feel like it has to be “earned”. How many YouTube channels are channels about making YouTube videos? Too many.

Regardless, because I’ve had the opportunity to make my own mistakes now for a few years (I started doing the video thing in earnest in 2019), and because I’ve recently made a few leaps in quality-of-life re: shooting and editing video, I thought I’d publish a few notes, if only for reference for my future self.

What's in a Linux executable?

Jan 12, 2020

22 min #os · #assembly · #linux · #rust

Executables have been fascinating to me ever since I discovered, as a kid, that they were just files. If you renamed a .exe to something else, you could open it in notepad! And if you renamed something else to a .exe, you’d get a neat error dialog.

Clearly, something was different about these files. Seen from notepad, they were mostly gibberish, but there had to be order in that chaos. 12-year-old me knew that, although he didn’t quite know how or where to dig to make sense of it all.

Game Design: The Binding of Isaac

Jun 22, 2013

3 min #perspective · #gamedesign

In hours, I have played more of The Binding of Isaac than any other game in my Steam library. Edmund McMillen said he wasn’t expecting it to be a hit, and has since proceeded to be proven thoroughly wrong.

It is kind of a big deal among a certain crowd: as I’m writing this, the second season of the Binding of Isaac Racing League, hosted and commented by Crumps, is in full swing - even though the game was certainly not designed for that!

I am a Java, C#, C or C++ developer, time to do some Rust

Aug 12, 2020

1 hour 12 min #rust · #traits · #lifetimes

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.

Summer fasterthanlime update

Aug 15, 2025

8 min #meta

There are news!

Cool Bear's hot tip

TL;DR: If you’re a patron or sponsor, check your Profile page to get detailed explainers of every perk. You’ll need to log in. Duh.

Here are all the changes I’m implementing, summarized as a table:

Before	After
📚 Articles remain exclusive for 6 months	Early access (couple weeks) for Silver tier
🎞️ No early access for video