13 posts. See all tags.
— part 8 of Rust Beyond Systems Programming
Three ways to hand code around — a block that runs now, a closure that runs later, a function with a name — and how to choose. Tests that become a table. And conditional compilation: code decided before the program runs, and why that is safer than deciding it while it runs.
— part 7 of Rust Beyond Systems Programming
postres picks a default output name, and one run showed it can be wrong. Tests that say what right means, a regular expression that fails them twice, the fix that was in the standard library all along — and a rule that would have found it first.
— part 6 of Rust Beyond Systems Programming
Some and None turn out to be an enum — and not the kind Java has. Tagged unions, an Option that cannot pass for the value it might hold, inputs kept apart from the domain, and a Config the rest of postres can trust: private, settled once built, and named even when the user does not name it.
— part 5 of Rust Beyond Systems Programming
postres learns to listen, and we write no parser to make it happen: the command line described as a struct, a macro that writes the parser from it — help screen and typo suggestions included — and what structs, attributes and macros are, and why they make Rust feel like a high-level language.
— part 4 of Rust Beyond Systems Programming
An empty directory becomes a Rust project: why a file-to-file converter is shaped like a compiler, a library and a binary in one package, modules and who can see them, a manifest with no dependencies in it, two lines that let the build refuse undocumented and unsafe code, and CI on three operating systems from the very first commit.
— part 3 of Rust Beyond Systems Programming
NullPointerException. Cannot read properties of undefined. ConcurrentModificationException. Segmentation fault. A tour of the failures that have nowhere left to happen once the types stop evaporating — and an honest account of the ones that stay.
— part 2 of Rust Beyond Systems Programming
The things you actually like about TypeScript, Java, Python and Go — unions, Optional, streams, lambdas, promises, channels, one command that builds everything — and where every one of them lives in Rust. No complaints in this one. Just the shape of an ordinary working day.
— part 1 of Rust Beyond Systems Programming
I learned Rust by building a bank in it, having never written a line of it before, while the corridor explained that Rust needs PhD-level programmers. What actually changed was not safety. It was relief: I stopped spending my day avoiding mistakes and got to spend it solving the problem.
— part 9 of You are now the whole team
Every mechanism this series has described, and the six things that beat them anyway — the wrong remedy for a right diagnosis, the machine that never complains, the gate that lied about itself, and the rule I was proudest of, whose hole an agent found and was entirely right about.
— part 6 of You are now the whole team
What the method from last time actually produced, measured rather than asserted: where the hours went, how much had to be done twice, and the afternoon a machine that had never built any of this was ready in nine minutes.
— part 5 of You are now the whole team
What I actually typed on the first night, and why almost none of it was an instruction. Five moves, quoted from the record — including the ones where I told the agent I did not understand a word of what it had just proposed.
— part 4 of You are now the whole team
Five hundred and forty lines of documentation, six files, and not one line of code — then fourteen more commits before the first one. Six jobs got done that evening, and I did not notice I was switching between them.
— part 2 of You are now the whole team
The thing I wanted for years and could not afford to build, what it sounds like when a terminal is navigable by heading, and why I still did not start by asking an agent to write it.