Advent of Code gets harder and harder, and I’m not getting any smarter. Or any more free time. So, in order to close out this series anyway, I’m going to try and port other people’s solutions from “language X” to Rust. That way, they already figured out the hard stuff, and we can just focus on the Rust bits!

Sounds good? Good. Let’s proceed.

So!

I have no shortage of ongoing writing projects - I still need to edit and publish the final parts of making our own executable packer, and I’ve recently announced I was working on a Rust book/series. Those are still both on the table.

Buuut… I’m also looking at other things. My best writing happens when I’m learning about something at the same time I’m writing about it. So for example, the Rust book is a bit harder to write, because I’m mostly trying to distill knowledge I’ve already absorbed (for the most part).

Executables have been fascinating to me ever since I discovered, as a kid, that they were just files. If you renamed a .exe to something else, you could open it in notepad! And if you renamed something else to a .exe, you’d get a neat error dialog.

Clearly, something was different about these files. Seen from notepad, they were mostly gibberish, but there had to be order in that chaos. 12-year-old me knew that, although he didn’t quite know how or where to dig to make sense of it all.

Time for another day of Advent of Code 2020.

For Day 5, we’re going to have to do…

So there’s an airline that uses binary space partitioning when referring to seats - there’s 128 rows and 8 columns. The first 7 characters are either F (Front, for the lower half) and B (back, for the upper half), and the last 3 are L (Left, for the lower half) or R (Right, for the upper half).

Writing Rust is pretty neat. But you know what’s even neater? Continuously testing Rust, releasing Rust, and eventually, shipping Rust to production. And for that, we want more than plug-in for a code editor.

We want… a workflow.

Why I specifically care about this

Welcome back and thanks for joining us for the reads notes… the thirteenth installment of our series on ELF files, what they are, what they can do, what does the dynamic linker do to them, and how can we do it ourselves.

I’ve been pretty successfully avoiding talking about TLS so far (no, not that one) but I guess we’ve reached a point where it cannot be delayed any further, so.

rock 0.9.5 is out! It’s the meanest, slimmest, baddest rock release yet.

To update, run git pull && make rescue as usual. To install from scratch, clone the repo, cd into it, and run make rescue from there - it’ll download the latest bootstrap, compile itself from C, then recompile itself from ooc.

Running rock -V should print this happy little version line:

Today I decided to release sam 0.2.0. There are only a handful of new features in there but it’s still releaseworthy! See the previous sam announcement for more information on the tool itself.

Source path and lib folders

Let’s take a look at what sam tells us when launching it.

sam version 0.2.0 Usage: sam [update|get|status|promote] Commands * update: update sam's grimoir of formulas * get [USEFILE]: clone and/or pull all dependencies * status [USEFILE]: display short git status of all dependencies * promote [USEFILE]: replace read-only github url with a read-write one for given use file * clone [--no-deps] [REPONAME]: clone a repository by its formula name Note: All USEFILE arguments are optional. By default, the first .use file of the current directory is used Copyleft 2013 Amos Wenger aka @nddrylliog

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!