Articles tagged #rust
Open sourcing the home CMS
The promise of Rust
The part that makes Rust scary is the part that makes it unique.
And it’s also what I miss in other programming languages — let me explain!
Rust syntax starts simple.
This function prints a number:
fn show(n: i64) {
println!("n = {n}");
}
And this program calls that function — it looks like any C-family language so far, we got parentheses, we got curly brackets, we got, uhh…
The case for sans-io
The most popular option to decompress ZIP files from the Rust programming language is a crate simply named zip — At the time of this writing, it has 48 million downloads. It’s fully-featured, supporting various compression methods, encryption, and even supports writing zip files.
However, that’s not the crate everyone uses to read ZIP files. Some applications benefit from using asynchronous I/O, especially if they decompress archives that they download from the network.
Catching up with async Rust
In December 2023, a minor miracle happened: async fn in traits shipped.
As of Rust 1.39, we already had free-standing async functions:
pub async fn read_hosts() -> eyre::Result<Vec<u8>> {
// etc.
}
…and async functions in impl blocks:
impl HostReader {
pub async fn read_hosts(&self) -> eyre::Result<Vec<u8>> {
// etc.
}
}
ktls now under the rustls org
What’s a ktls
I started work on ktls and ktls-sys, a pair of crates exposing Kernel TLS offload to Rust, about two years ago.
kTLS lets the kernel (and, in turn, any network interface that supports it) take care of encryption, framing, etc., for the entire duration of a TLS connection… as soon as you have a TLS connection.
For the handshake itself (hellos, change cipher, encrypted extensions, certificate verification, etc.), you still have to use a userland TLS implementation.
Cracking Electron apps open
I use the draw.io desktop app to
make diagrams for my website. I run it on an actual desktop, like Windows or
macOS, but the asset pipeline that converts .drawio files, to .pdf, to
.svg, and then to .svg again (but smaller) runs on Linux.
So I have a Rust program somewhere that opens headless chromium, and loads just the HTML/JS/CSS part of draw.io I need to render my diagrams, and then use Chromium’s “print to PDF” functionality to save a PDF.
Extra credit
We’ve achieved our goals already with this series: we have a web service written in Rust, built into a Docker image with nix, with a nice dev shell, that we can deploy to fly.io.
But there’s always room for improvement, and so I wanted to talk about a few things we didn’t bother doing in the previous chapters.
Making clash-geoip available in the dev shell
Generating a docker image with nix
There it is. The final installment.
Over the course of this series, we’ve built a very useful Rust web service that shows us colored ASCII art cats, and we’ve packaged it with docker, and deployed it to https://fly.io.
We did all that without using nix at all, and then in the last few chapters,
we’ve learned to use nix, and now it’s time to tell docker build goodbye,
along with this whole-ass Dockerfile:
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