Alright! The day 12 puzzle involves path finding, and it seems like a good time to lean more heavily on the WASM embeds I’ve set up for the previous parts.

Let’s start by setting up the types we’ll want!

Types and parsing

Our input is a heightmap, like so:

Sabqponm abcryxxl accszExk acctuvwj abdefghi

Where 'a'..='z' is a square with a given elevation (from lowest to highest), S is the start, and E is the end.

In my previous article, I said I needed to stop thinking of Rust generics as Java generics, because in Rust, generic types are erased.

Someone gently pointed out that they are also erased in Java, the difference was elsewhere. And so, let’s learn the difference together.

Java generics

I learned Java first (a long, long time ago), and their approach to generics made sense to me at the time.

In 2020, I switched from a static site generator to something homemade.

And, as tradition commands, I did a whole write-up about it.

Since writing articles and making videos is now my full-time occupation, I took some time to upgrade futile, my server software, to the latest and greatest the Rust ecosystem has to offer.

A few days ago I posted an ooc quine. But while browing HackerNews, I found an even shorter one. The shortest!

Here it is, in its full glory

Can’t see anything? That’s an empty file. It will compile and run just fine. ooc doesn’t require a main function - you can just shove code in there that will run at the program’s initialization. If there’s none, no big deal! It’ll just not run anything.

So!

I have no shortage of ongoing writing projects - I still need to edit and publish the final parts of making our own executable packer, and I’ve recently announced I was working on a Rust book/series. Those are still both on the table.

Buuut… I’m also looking at other things. My best writing happens when I’m learning about something at the same time I’m writing about it. So for example, the Rust book is a bit harder to write, because I’m mostly trying to distill knowledge I’ve already absorbed (for the most part).

I often write pieces that showcase how well Rust can work for you, and how it can let you build powerful abstractions, and prevents you from making a bunch of mistakes.

If you read something like Some mistakes Rust doesn’t catch in isolation, it could seem as if I had only nice things to say about Rust, and it’s a perfect little fantasy land where nothing ever goes wrong.

Note: this article is adapted from a presentation I gave at a Rust Paris Meetup — that’s why it sounds a little different than usual. Enjoy!

Good evening! Tonight, I will attempt to answer the question: Does Dioxus spark joy? Or at the very least, whimsy.

What’s Dioxus, you ask? It is first and foremost a name that is quote: “legally not inspired by any Pokémon”.

There’s a question that always comes up when people pick up the Rust programming language: why are there two string types? Why is there String, and &str?

My Declarative Memory Management article answers the question partially, but there is a lot more to say about it, so let’s run a few experiments and see if we can conjure up a thorough defense of Rust’s approach over, say, C’s.

I do not come to you with answers today, but rather some observations and a lot of questions.

The weird glitch

Recently I was editing some video and I noticed this:

Not what the finger is pointing at — the dots.

Here are the separate layers this image is made up of: the background is a stock image I’ve licensed from Envato Elements:

Because I use it as a background image, I’ve cranked down the exposition in the Color tab: