The Nature weekly journal of science was first published in 1869. And after one and a half century, it has finally completed one cycle of carcinization, by publishing an article about the Rust programming language.

It’s a really good article.

What I liked about this article is that it didn’t just talk about performance, or even just memory safety - it also talked about correctness.

Learning Rust is… an experience. An emotional journey. I’ve rarely been more frustrated than in my first few months of trying to learn Rust.

What makes it worse is that it doesn’t matter how much prior experience you have, in Java, C#, C or C++ or otherwise - it’ll still be unnerving.

In fact, more experience probably makes it worse! The habits have settled in deeper, and there’s a certain expectation that, by now, you should be able to get that done in a shorter amount of time.

Day 9’s problem statement is convoluted - the “ah maybe that’s why I don’t usually do Advent of Code” kind of convoluted, but let’s give it a go anyway.

So, we have a series of numbers, like so:

35 20 15 25 47 40 62 55 65 95 102 117 150 182 127 219 299 277 309 576

And uh the first N numbers are a “preamble” and every number that comes after that must be the sum of any two of the numbers that come before it.

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

I’ve been bragging about my website software for years! For… whew, it’s been 5 years!

I’ve been teasing folks about the cool things I did from the beginning — here are all the articles and series I’ve written that mention it:

• 2020: A new website
• 2021: Don’t shell out!
• 2022: Updating fasterthanli.me

There are news!

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

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:

In the day 8 problem, our input is a height map:

30373 25512 65332 33549 35390

This is a 5x5 grid, and every number denotes the height of a tree. For part 1, we must find out how many trees are visible from the outside of the grid.

If we consider the first row, from the left: only the 3 is visible: it obscures the 0. From the right, 3 and 7 are visible.

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.

Let’s use the Advent of Code 2022, a series of programming challenges of increasing difficulty, to learn more about the Rust programming language.