rust

Making our own ping

Sep 27, 2019

4 hours 22 min #networking · #rust · #windows

When I launched my Patreon, I vowed to explain how computers work. But in 2019, computers rarely work in isolation. So let’s take the time to write a few articles about how computers talk to each other.

Declarative memory management

Sep 19, 2019

35 min #rust · #memory

It feels like an eternity since I’ve started using Rust, and yet I remember vividly what it felt like to bang my head against the borrow checker for the first few times.

I’m definitely not alone in that, and there’s been quite a few articles on the subject! But I want to take some time to present the borrow checker from the perspective of its benefits, rather than as an opponent to fend with.

Reading files the hard way - Part 3 (ftrace, disk layouts, ext4)

Aug 31, 2019

33 min #os · #rust · #kernel · #filesystems

So far, we’ve seen many ways to read a file from different programming languages, we’ve learned about syscalls, how to make those from assembly, then we’ve learned about memory mapping, virtual address spaces, and generally some of the mechanisms in which userland and the kernel interact.

But in our exploration, we’ve always considered the kernel more or less like a “black box”. It’s time to change that.

Reading files the hard way

Aug 31, 2019

1 hour 6 min #os · #rust

Everybody knows how to use files. You just open up File Explorer, the Finder, or a File Manager, and bam - it’s chock-full of files. There’s folders and files as far as the eye can see. It’s a genuine filapalooza. I have never once heard someone complain there were not enough files on their computer.

But what is a file, really? And what does reading a file entail, exactly?

Reading files the hard way - Part 1 (node.js, C, rust, strace)

Aug 31, 2019

15 min #os · #rust · #c · #strace · #kernel · #linux

Everybody knows how to use files. You just open up File Explorer, the Finder, or a File Manager, and bam - it’s chock-full of files. There’s folders and files as far as the eye can see. It’s a genuine filapalooza. I have never once heard someone complain there were not enough files on their computer.

But what is a file, really? And what does reading a file entail, exactly?

Rust modules vs files

Jul 01, 2019

18 min #rust

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.

Rust generics vs Java generics

May 09, 2019

9 min #rust · #java

In my previous article, I said I needed to stop thinking of Rust generics as Java generics, because in Rust, generic types are erased.

Someone gently pointed out that they are also erased in Java, the difference was elsewhere. And so, let’s learn the difference together.

Java generics

I learned Java first (a long, long time ago), and their approach to generics made sense to me at the time.

Recursive iterators in Rust

May 08, 2019

7 min #rust

I’ve been looking for this blog post everywhere, but it doesn’t exist, so I guess it’s my turn to write about Some Fun with Rust.

The task at hand

Let’s say you have a recursive, acyclic data structure, like so:

struct Node {
    values: Vec<i32>,
    children: Vec<Node>,
}

This allows you to represent a tree-like structure:

   [1, 2, 3]
       /\
      /  \
     /    \
    /      \
   /        \
[4, 5]    [6, 7]