212 results for "":
Proc macro support in rust-analyzer for nightly rustc versions
I don’t mean to complain. Doing software engineering for a living is a situation of extreme privilege. But there’s something to be said about how alienating it can be at times.
Once, just once, I want to be able to answer someone’s “what are you working on?” question with “see that house? it wasn’t there last year. I built that”.
Instead for now, I have to answer with: “well you see… support for proc macros was broken in rust-analyzer for folks who used a nightly rustc toolchain, due to incompatibilities in the bridge (which is an unstable interface in the first place), and it’s bound to stay broken for the foreseeable future, not specifically because of technical challenges, but mostly because of human and organizational challenges, and I think I’ve found a way forward that will benefit everyone.”
Reading files the hard way - Part 2 (x86 asm, linux kernel)
Looking at that latest mental model, it’s.. a bit suspicious that every program ends up calling the same set of functions. It’s almost like something different happens when calling those.
Are those even regular functions? Can we step through them with a debugger?
If we run our stdio-powered C program in gdb, and break on read, we can
confirm that we indeed end up calling a read function (which is called
__GI___libc_read here, but oh well):
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.
Some mistakes Rust doesn't catch
I still get excited about programming languages. But these days, it’s not so much because of what they let me do, but rather what they don’t let me do.
Ultimately, what you can with a programming language is seldom limited by the language itself: there’s nothing you can do in C++ that you can’t do in C, given infinite time.
As long as a language is turing-complete and compiles down to assembly, no matter the interface, it’s the same machine you’re talking to. You’re limited by… what your hardware can do, how much memory it has (and how fast it is), what kind of peripherals are plugged into it, and so on.
Peeking inside a Rust enum
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.
Introducing facet: Reflection for Rust
I have long been at war against Rust compile times.
Part of the solution for me was to buy my way into Apple Silicon dreamland, where builds are, like… faster. I remember every time I SSH into an x86_64 server, even the nice 64-core ones.
And another part was, of course, to get dirty with Rust itself.
I wrote Why is my Rust build so slow?, which goes in-depth into rust build performance, down to rustc self-profiling even!
Cross-compilation notes
I’ll keep updating this article as I go, just to put stuff in all the same place.
Platforms
Cross-compiling for Linux
I’m pretty sure it’s possible to cross-compile for Linux on other OSes, seeing as everything is open-source, but I have never done it - and why would I want to? Linux is the friendliest to build on, so it’s better to use it as a build environment.
Parsing IPv4 packets, including numbers smaller than bytes
Hello and welcome to Part 11 of this series, wherein we finally use some of the code I prototyped way back when I was planning this series.
Where are we standing?
Let’s review the progress we’ve made in the first 10 parts: first, we’ve started thinking about what it takes for computers to communicate. Then, we’ve followed a rough outline of the various standards and protocols that have emerged since the 1970s.
Veronica Mars and NTLM password hashes
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!
Surviving Rust async interfaces
I used to be afraid of async Rust. It’s easy to get into trouble!
But thanks to the work done by the whole community, async Rust is getting easier to use every week. One project I think is doing particularly great work in this area is async-std.
Let’s say we want to compute the SHA3-256 hash of a file. It’s very easy to do with synchronous I/O: