Musings

First of all, happy new year! It’s been awhile since I wrote anything, and there are many things I’d love to write more about. Sadly, time is a limited resource and I’ve been managing to keep quite busy. For now, I’ll stick to an update about a wave of change in my life. Glowing memories Over the last year and a half I’ve had the absolutely wonderful pleasure of working with my dear friends at Asquera in beautiful Berlin. It has given me ample opportunity to learn, teach, and get experience with a wide range of topics. I will carry...

Recently there has been quite a bit of talk about WebAssembly, a new format for code for the web. It is a compile target for languages like C and Rust that enables us to write, and run, code from these languages in our browser. In the interest of learning more about this technology (and to avoid writing more Javascript) let’s explore together and get our hands dirty! Disclaimer: WebAssembly is stabilized, but most implementations are not. The information contained here may become out of date or be incorrect, despite working at the time of writing. Before we start please make...

In this post we’ll be discussing one way to set up your machine for Rust development. There are different ways, particularly related to the text editor, so feel free to skip what is irrelevant to you. We’ll focus on: Setting up Rust via Rustup. Valuable tools like clippy and rustfmt. Configuring VS Code for Rust. Debugging with the command line and inside of VS Code. Using different compile targets. Everything we do should be functional on both Linux and MacOS, on Windows your mileage may vary. I, unfortunately, don’t have a Windows instance to test on. In order to finish...

Recently there has been a lot of progress in the Rust language towards a robust asynchronous stack. In this article we’ll take a look at what these things are, take a tour of what’s available, play with some examples, and talk about how the pieces fit together. We’ll get started with the futures crate to start, move on to futures_cpupool, and then eventually to tokio. We will assume you have some knowledge of programming, and have at least thought about trying Rust before. What are Futures and Async? When writing code to do some action which may take some time,...

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the patterns and structures which we program with. It’s really wonderful to start exploring a project and see familiar patterns and styles which you’ve already used before. It makes it easier to understand the project, and empowers you to start working on the project faster. Sometimes you’re working on a new project and realize that you need to do something in the same way as you did in another project. This thing might not be a functionality or a library, it might not be something which you can encode into some clever macro...