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.

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.

It’s time for Day 4 of the Advent of Code 2020!

Now, I’ve already had a look at the problem statement, at least for part 1, and I’m not particularly excited.

But it will allow me to underline some of the points I’ve recently been *trying to make about types and correctness.

The problem is to parse passports, with fields like these:

I want to write blog posts, but right now I have too much to do.

So instead, here are bullet points:

• I wrote an ooc tool named sam, which helps you keep your git repos up-to-date, and helps to remind you what to push when switching workstations. It’s pretty neat, and portable.

• A while ago, I started working on homebrew for Windows, or rather, for MinGW+MSYS. Provided you have msysgit and Ruby in your PATH, it’ll let you brew install most packages. I’ve tested a few dozen, send in your pull requests anytime.

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:

Putting thoughts in bits

I think about lots of things but when it comes down to writing them, drawing them, implementing them, it’s not that easy. Even with years of practice in each of these trades, it’s still an uphill battle.

Which is why I am not going to read that article after I wrote it and will go straight to publication.

Not assuming nobody cares

I’ve spent the past few weeks after rock 0.9.8’s release working on some of the neglected aspects of ooc, namely tooling support and performance.

My kingdom for a vim plug-in!

Well, technically, ooc.vim is a few years old, and it was even updated a few times to match new ooc features. But unfortunately, so far, it was limited to syntax highlighting.

Long story short: a couple of my articles got really popular on a bunch of sites, and someone, somewhere, went “well, let’s see how much traffic that smart-ass can handle”, and suddenly I was on the receiving end of a couple DDoS attacks.

It really doesn’t matter what the articles were about — the attack is certainly not representative of how folks on either side of any number of debates generally behave.

async_trait’s one weird type ascription trick

Now that I got the Log in with GitHub feature working, let’s explore what this would’ve looked like with the async_trait crate.

First up, the trait definition:

/// Something that can refresh credentials #[async_trait::async_trait] pub trait CredentialsRefresher { async fn refresh(&self, creds: &FutileCredentials) -> eyre::Result<FutileCredentials>; }

The most popular option to decompress ZIP files from the Rust programming language is a crate simply named zip — At the time of this writing, it has 48 million downloads. It’s fully-featured, supporting various compression methods, encryption, and even supports writing zip files.

However, that’s not the crate everyone uses to read ZIP files. Some applications benefit from using asynchronous I/O, especially if they decompress archives that they download from the network.