So you want to do live streams. Are you sure? Okay. Let’s talk about it.

Let’s talk numbers

Being a “content creator” (sorry for those who hate that term) is a job, for sure, and many people do it, successfully, full-time, they pay rent with it etc.

Platforms like Twitch & YouTube would have you think that, if you put in enough effort, you can grow your channel from nothing to 🎉 profitable ✨ in just a few short years.

I want to write blog posts, but right now I have too much to do.

So instead, here are bullet points:

• I wrote an ooc tool named sam, which helps you keep your git repos up-to-date, and helps to remind you what to push when switching workstations. It’s pretty neat, and portable.

• A while ago, I started working on homebrew for Windows, or rather, for MinGW+MSYS. Provided you have msysgit and Ruby in your PATH, it’ll let you brew install most packages. I’ve tested a few dozen, send in your pull requests anytime.

In the last article, we managed to load a program (hello-dl) that uses a single dynamic library (libmsg.so) containing a single exported symbol, msg.

Our program, hello-dl.asm, looked like this:

 global _start extern msg section .text _start: mov rdi, 1 ; stdout fd mov rsi, msg mov rdx, 38 ; 37 chars + newline , , ,

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.

Today I am joining you from the relative discomfort of my living room (since my better half has commandeered the home office due to Way Too Many Calls) to tackle the day 6 challenge, which I’m excited about: maybe despite, maybe because of, the low-grade fever I’m under.

Part 1

Our input is a jumble of letters, and we’re supposed to find the position of the first substring that’s “four different characters”.

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:

Day, 10! Day, 10!

Okay, Day 10.

Again, the problem statement is very confusing - but what it all boils down to is this. We have a list of numbers:

16 10 15 5 1 11 7 19 6 12 4

To which we need to add 0 and whatever the maximum was, plus three:

16 10 15 5 1 11 7 19 6 12 4 0 22

From there on, if we take them in order, we’ll have gaps of 1 and gaps of 3:

It’s time for the Day 14 problem!

After the hassle that was Day 13, I hope this time we’ll have a relatively chill time. And, at least for Part 1, that is true.

Our input looks something like this:

mask = XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX1XXXX0X mem[8] = 11 mem[7] = 101 mem[8] = 0

mem is our memory. Our addresses are 36-bit wide, but as you’ll see, that doesn’t matter much.

A while back, I asked on Twitter what people found confusing in Rust, and one of the top topics was “how the module system maps to files”.

I remember struggling with that a lot when I first started Rust, so I’ll try to explain it in a way that makes sense to me.

Important note

All that follows is written for Rust 2021 edition. I have no interest in learning (or teaching) the ins and outs of the previous version, especially because it was a lot more confusing to me.

Onwards! To the day 10 puzzle.

I don’t see a way to make part 1 especially fun — so let’s just get to it.

Parsing

As usual, let’s reach for the nom crate…

$ cargo add nom@7 (cut)

…to parse the input into nicely-organized Rust data structures:

// in `src/main.rs` use nom::{ branch::alt, bytes::complete::tag, combinator::{map value sequencepreceded -> noop = addx = nomcharactercompletei32 noop addx i -> => _ =>