Intro

When I started my Patreon, I had no idea if it would work at all. The whole thing seemed like a gamble: spend an inordinate amount of time writing quality articles, and hope that folks will like it enough to kick in 5, 10, or 50 bucks a month just to see more of them.

I’m happy to say the gamble paid off - literally. Take that, impostor syndrome!

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}:

Our January project was ambitious: a 2D puzzle game, a-la lemmings with a twist, with big and numerous levels. And of course, all using our homegrown tools, from the compiler to the level editor to the UI system and game framework.

However, January ended too soon, and, sleepless nights notwithstanding, I had to resolve to publish something completely different. It was a good occasion to get to know Twine.

Good morning! It is still 2020, and the world is literally on fire, so I guess we could all use a distraction.

This article continues the tradition of me getting shamelessly nerd-sniped - once by Pascal about small strings, then again by a twitch viewer about Rust enum sizes.

This time, Ana was handing out free nerdsnipes, so I got in line, and mine was:

In the last part, we’ve finally parsed some IPv4 packets. We even found a way to filter only IPv4 packets that contain ICMP packets.

There’s one thing we haven’t done though, and that’s verify their checksum. Folks could be sending us invalid IPv4 packets and we’d be parsing them like a fool!

This series is getting quite long, so let’s jump right into it.

Just 8 days after the last release, rock 0.9.6 is out.

To update, run git pull && make rescue as usual. To install from scratch, clone the repo, cd into it, and run make rescue from there - it’ll download the latest bootstrap, compile itself from C, then recompile itself from ooc.

Running rock -V should give you something like this:

rock 0.9.6 codename loki, built on Wed Feb 20 15:09:08 2013

This is going to be a short one.

Basically, since February, both shamanas, fredreichbier and I have putting way too much work into the latest iteration of rock, an ooc compiler written in ooc.

I have the pleasure to announce that version 0.9.7, codename pacino is now out, as you can plainly see on the new website: https://ooc-lang.github.io

You can read the release notes to learn what has changed, but basically expect a lot of fixes, some new APIs, and awesome backtraces.

Now that my website is deployed as a container image, I wanted to give nix a try. I’m still doing it the old-fashioned way right now: with a Dockerfile, running cargo in a “builder” image, copying stuff out of there into a slimmer image (that still has an Ubuntu base, even though distroless images are a thing now).

But why?

I was mostly interested in nix because some parts of my website have pretty big native dependencies. futile itself mostly relies on sqlite3 and some JS engine (used to be quickjs, currently duktape because MSVC Windows builds). But the asset processing pipeline, salvage (which I’d like to integrate with futile at some point) has a bunch more!

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

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}, sequence::preceded, IResult, }; #[derive(Debug, Clone, Copy, PartialEq, Eq, Hash)] enum Instruction { Noop, Addx(i32), } impl Instruction { fn parse(i: &str) -> IResult<&str, Self> { let noop = tag("noop"); let addx = preceded(tag("addx "), nom::character::complete::i32); alt((value(Self::Noop, noop), map(addx, Self::Addx)))(i) } fn cycles(self) -> u32 { match self { Self::Noop => 1, Self::Addx(_) => 2, } } }