221 results for "":
The promise of Rust
The part that makes Rust scary is the part that makes it unique.
And it’s also what I miss in other programming languages — let me explain!
Rust syntax starts simple.
This function prints a number:
fn show ( n : i64 ) {
println! ( "n = {n}" );
}
And this program calls that function — it looks like any C-family language so far, we got parentheses, we got curly brackets, we got, uhh…
Abstracting away correctness
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.
Day 17 (Advent of Code 2022)
Advent of Code gets harder and harder, and I’m not getting any smarter. Or any more free time. So, in order to close out this series anyway, I’m going to try and port other people’s solutions from “language X” to Rust. That way, they already figured out the hard stuff, and we can just focus on the Rust bits!
Sounds good? Good. Let’s proceed.
ELF relocations
The last article, Position-independent code, was a mess. But who could blame us? We looked at the world, and found it to be a chaotic and seemingly nonsensical place. So, in order to blend in, we had to let go of a little bit of sanity.
The time has come to reclaim it.
Short of faulty memory sticks, memory locations don’t magically turn from
0x0 into valid addresses. Someone is doing the turning, and we’re going to
find out who, if it takes the rest of the series.
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.
Introducing arborium, a tree-sitter distribution
About two weeks ago I entered a discussion with the docs.rs team about, basically, why we have to look at this:
When we could be looking at this:
And of course, as always, there are reasons why things are the way they are. In an effort to understand those reasons, I opened a GitHub issue which resulted in a short but productive discussion.
I walked away discouraged, and then decided to, reasons be damned, attack this problem from three different angles.
Writing a Dockerfile for catscii
Now that our service is production-ready, it’s time to deploy it somewhere.
There’s a lot of ways to approach this: what we are going to do, though, is build a docker image. Or, I should say, an OCI image.
This is still a series about Nix, but again: because the best way to see the benefits of Nix is to do it without Nix first, we’ll use only Docker’s tooling to build the image.
ooc generics and flawed designs
ooc is perhaps one of my proudest achievements, but at the same time it’s one of the most annoying thorns in my side.
The main reason is that its design is flawed, and some things can’t be easily fixed at this point. Now don’t get me wrong: every design is flawed to some extent. Design, either when done by a lone coder, or by a committee, never comes out “perfect” — ignoring the fact there is no universal/objective measure of “perfectness”.
Lestac: The Making Of
Update: Lestac is now available in Early Access on itch.io! Read more on the official page
So, Lestac is out! Ain’t that something? For those who don’t know, it’s Sylvain and I’s entry for Ludum Dare 28, a video game jam that happens every four months.
Here’s how it looks:
You can play it now if you haven’t yet - it’s available for Linux, OS/X, and Windows. And then you can come back and read this postmortem if you will!
Face cams: the missing guide
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.