In the previous article, We’ve built a nagaqueen-based tool that can parse one ooc file, detect class declarations and print its doc strings. Today, we’re making a bit of infrastructure for our app to support more sizable projects.

Source path and lib folders

Parsing a single file was a nice milestone, but it’s not nearly enough. We want to generate documentation for a whole project at a time: and since we’ll want to cross-link the various bits of documentation we generate, we’ll also need to parse the various dependencies (such as the ooc sdk, and any used library) so that we can resolve argument types and link them properly.

HTTP does a pretty good job staying out of everyone’s way.

If you’re reading this article, there’s a solid chance it was delivered to you over HTTP. Even if you’re reading this from an RSS reader or something. And you didn’t even have to think about it!

“Not having to think about it” is certainly a measure of success for a given technology. By contrast, I think about Bluetooth a lot. I wish I didn’t.

Falling out of love with warp

Back when I wrote this codebase, warp was the best / only alternative for something relatively high-level on top of hyper.

I was never super fond of warp’s model — it’s a fine crate, just not for me.

The way routing works is essentially building a type that gets larger and larger. One route might look like:

let bye = warp::path("bye") .and(warp::path::param()) .map(|name: String| format!("Good bye, {}!", name));

I’ve been looking for this blog post everywhere, but it doesn’t exist, so I guess it’s my turn to write about Some Fun with Rust.

The task at hand

Let’s say you have a recursive, acyclic data structure, like so:

struct Node { values: Vec<i32>, children: Vec<Node>, }

This allows you to represent a tree-like structure:

[1, 2, 3] /\ / \ / \ / \ / \ [4, 5] [6, 7]

So! Rust futures! Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Until it’s not. So let’s do the easy thing, and then instead of waiting for the hard thing to sneak up on us, we’ll go for it intentionally.

Cool Bear's hot tip

That’s all-around solid life advice.

Choo choo here comes the easy part 🚂💨

We make a new project:

$ cargo new waytoodeep Created binary (application) `waytoodeep` package

A little while ago, I wrote an article on things that can go wrong when downloading, it listed a series of reasons, from network problems to invalid content to imperfect hardware that may occur when initially installing a game.

This article discusses what methods we can use to upgrade a game to a later version, when an older version has been successfully installed.

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!

I write a ton of articles about rust. And in those articles, the main focus is about writing Rust code that compiles. Once it compiles, well, we’re basically in the clear! Especially if it compiles to a single executable, that’s made up entirely of Rust code.

That works great for short tutorials, or one-off explorations.

Unfortunately, “in the real world”, our code often has to share the stage with other code. And Rust is great at that. Compiling Go code to a static library, for example, is relatively finnicky. It insists on being built with GCC (and no other compiler), and linked with GNU ld (and no other linker).

I know what you’re thinking: haven’t we strayed from the whole “content pipeline” theme in this series?

Well… fair. But compiling and distributing software is part of software engineering, and unless you’re in specific circles, I see that taught a lot less than the “just write code and stuff happens” part.

So, how does ping.exe actually send a ping? It seems unrealistic that ping.exe itself implements all the protocols involved in sending a ping. So it must be calling some sort of library. Also, since it ends up talking to the outside world via a NIC (network interface controller), the kernel is probably involved at some point.

In reading files the hard way - part 2, we learned about dynamic libraries (like libc), and the Linux kernel, and how syscalls allowed us to ask the Linux kernel to do our bidding. For this series, we’re going to have to look at the Windows equivalents.