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.

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.

I’ve been working on the itch.io desktop app for about a year now, so I thought I’d make a quick recap:

At the time of this writing, the app has been downloaded about 460K times (including updates). Not counting the back-end, the app and its various components are made up of around 100K lines of code (mostly javascript and golang), most of which is open-source.

Alright. ALRIGHT. I know, we’re all excited, but let’s think about what we’re doing again.

So we’ve managed to look at real network traffic and parse it completely. We’ve also taken some ICMP packets, parsed them, and then serialized them right back and we got the exact same result.

So I know what you’re thinking - let’s just move our way down the stack again - stuff that ICMP packet in an IP packet, then in an Ethernet frame, and then serialize the whole thing.

We recently went way too in-depth into volume and loudness and all the relevant standards, like EBU R 128 — which is important to broadcast engineers, but, I’ll admit, not very entertaining to look at!

Spectrograms, on the other hand, are very fun to look at:

There’s a lot of care that goes into designing a nice spectrogram, and I want to walk you through how I made my own, assembling a couple of Rust libraries like cpal and egui.

It happened when I least expected it.

Someone, somewhere (above me, presumably) made a decision. “From now on”, they declared, “all our new stuff must be written in Rust”.

I’m not sure where they got that idea from. Maybe they’ve been reading propaganda. Maybe they fell prey to some confident asshole, and convinced themselves that Rust was the answer to their problems.

One could say I have a bit of an obsession with build times.

I believe having a “tight feedback loop” is extremely valuable: when I work on a large codebase, I want to be able to make small incremental changes and check very often that things are going as expected.

Especially if I’m working on a project that needs to move quickly: say, the product for an early-stage startup, or a side-project for which I only ever get to do 1-hour work bursts at most.

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}:

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).