There are news!

Here are all the changes I’m implementing, summarized as a table:

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.

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.

A few days ago I posted an ooc quine. But while browing HackerNews, I found an even shorter one. The shortest!

Here it is, in its full glory

Can’t see anything? That’s an empty file. It will compile and run just fine. ooc doesn’t require a main function - you can just shove code in there that will run at the program’s initialization. If there’s none, no big deal! It’ll just not run anything.

There’s a question that always comes up when people pick up the Rust programming language: why are there two string types? Why is there String, and &str?

My Declarative Memory Management article answers the question partially, but there is a lot more to say about it, so let’s run a few experiments and see if we can conjure up a thorough defense of Rust’s approach over, say, C’s.

In order to increase fluency in a programming language, one has to read a lot of it.

But how can you read a lot of it if you don’t know what it means?

In this article, instead of focusing on one or two concepts, I’ll try to go through as many Rust snippets as I can, and explain what the keywords and symbols they contain mean.

Ready? Go!

Variable bindings

It’s time for some personal and professional news!

TL;DR: I started a podcast with James, I’m stable on antidepressants, I’m giving a P99 CONF about my Rust/io_uring/HTTP work, I’m trying on “they/them” as pronouns, I’m open-sourcing merde_json, rubicon and others, I got a divorce in 2023, I found a new business model.

Now that we’re on the same page: let’s unpack this a bit!

Our catscii program does everything we want it to do, except that it’s a command-line application rather than a web server. Let’s fix that.

Enter axum

The documentation for the axum crate tells us how to make a basic web server, and we honestly don’t need much more than that.

So let’s add axum:

amos@miles:~/catscii$ cargo add [email protected] Updating crates.io index Adding axum =0.6 to dependencies. Features: + form + http1 + json + matched-path + original-uri + query + tokio + tower-log - __private_docs - headers - http2 - macros - multipart - w

Part 1

Let’s tackle the day 4 challenge!

In this one, we get an input like this:

2-4,6-8 2-3,4-5 5-7,7-9 2-8,3-7 6-6,4-6 2-6,4-8

Each line has two ranges: the first line has ranges containing 2, 3, 4, and 6, 7, 8. We must count how many pairs have ranges where one fully contains the other.

In Rust, we can express this with “inclusive ranges” (std::ops::RangeInclusive), and those implement Iterator, so we can do:

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!