Articles tagged #rust
When rustc explodes
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.
Remote development with Rust on fly.io
Disclaimer:
At the time of this writing, I benefit from the fly.io “Employee Free Tier”. I don’t pay for side projects hosted there “within reasonable limits”. The project discussed here qualifies for that.
Why you might want a remote dev environment
Fearmongering aside — and Cthulhu knows there’s been a bunch, since this unfortunate tweet — there’s a bunch of reasons to want a remote dev environment.
The curse of strong typing
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.
I won free load testing
Long story short: a couple of my articles got really popular on a bunch of sites, and someone, somewhere, went “well, let’s see how much traffic that smart-ass can handle”, and suddenly I was on the receiving end of a couple DDoS attacks.
It really doesn’t matter what the articles were about — the attack is certainly not representative of how folks on either side of any number of debates generally behave.
Futures Nostalgia
Up until recently, hyper was my favorite Rust HTTP framework. It’s low-level, but that gives you a lot of control over what happens.
Here’s what a sample hyper application would look like:
$ cargo new nostalgia
Created binary (application) `nostalgia` package
$ cd nostalgia
$ cargo add hyper@0.14 --features "http1 tcp server"
Updating 'https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io-index' index
Adding hyper v0.14 to dependencies with features: ["http1", "tcp", "server"]
$ cargo add tokio@1 --features "full"
Updating 'https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io-index' index
Adding tokio v1 to dependencies with features: ["full"]
Request coalescing in async Rust
As the popular saying goes, there are only two hard problems in computer science: caching, off-by-one errors, and getting a Rust job that isn’t cryptocurrency-related.
Today, we’ll discuss caching! Or rather, we’ll discuss… “request coalescing”, or “request deduplication”, or “single-flighting” - there’s many names for that concept, which we’ll get into fairly soon.
A Rust match made in hell
I often write pieces that showcase how well Rust can work for you, and how it can let you build powerful abstractions, and prevents you from making a bunch of mistakes.
If you read something like Some mistakes Rust doesn’t catch in isolation, it could seem as if I had only nice things to say about Rust, and it’s a perfect little fantasy land where nothing ever goes wrong.
Some mistakes Rust doesn't catch
I still get excited about programming languages. But these days, it’s not so much because of what they let me do, but rather what they don’t let me do.
Ultimately, what you can with a programming language is seldom limited by the language itself: there’s nothing you can do in C++ that you can’t do in C, given infinite time.
As long as a language is turing-complete and compiles down to assembly, no matter the interface, it’s the same machine you’re talking to. You’re limited by… what your hardware can do, how much memory it has (and how fast it is), what kind of peripherals are plugged into it, and so on.
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