Because I started accepting donations via GitHub Sponsors, and because donating at the “Silver” tier or above gives you advance access to articles and your name in the credits, I need to interface with the GitHub API the same way I do the Patreon API.

Because I’d rather rely on third-party identity providers than provide my own sign up / log in / password forgotten / 2FA flow, user identifiers on my website are simply {provider}:{provider_specific_user_id}:

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:

Okay, I lied.

I’m deciding - right this instant - that using wmic is cheating too. Oh, it was fair game when we were learning about Windows, but we’re past that now.

We know there’s IPv4 routing tables, and we know network interfaces have indices (yes, they do change when you disable/enable one, so ill-timed configuration changes may make our program blow up).

As the popular saying goes, there are only two hard problems in computer science: caching, off-by-one errors, and getting a Rust job that isn’t cryptocurrency-related.

Today, we’ll discuss caching! Or rather, we’ll discuss… “request coalescing”, or “request deduplication”, or “single-flighting” - there’s many names for that concept, which we’ll get into fairly soon.

My honeymoon with the Go language is extremely over.

This article is going to have a different tone from what I’ve been posting the past year - it’s a proper rant. And I always feel bad writing those, because, inevitably, it discusses things a lot of people have been working very hard on.

In spite of that, here we are.

Having invested thousands of hours into the language, and implemented several critical (to my employer) pieces of infrastructure with it, I wish I hadn’t.

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 -> => _ =>

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)

The end of Advent of Code 2020 is fast approaching, and we’re nowhere near done. Time to do Day 6!

The problem statement here is a little contrived, as uh, as the days that came before it, but that won’t stop us.

Basically, the input looks like this:

abc a b c ab ac a a a a b

Each line represents one person, and “groups of persons” are separated by blank lines.

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!

The ooc language is known to be friendly to C libraries, and we have a slew of them covered on GitHub, but one common hurdle is how to correctly declare extern functions.

Argument types

For an ooc function prototype, there are many types of arguments. You can go with regular variable declarations, like so:

something: func (a: Int, b: Int, c: String)

But in this case, a and b have the same type, so you can also use multi-declarations to shorten it a bit: