Programming, math, and other things gratuitously nerdy. Opinions are my own.
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Back in college, I was very interested in Java bytecode. When I got an internship at Google in 2013, I was skeptical of the security of the Java version of Google App Engine and got permission to spend the last week of my internship doing a mini red team exercise, trying to break into App Engine. This is the story of…
I’ve been using Rust for hobby projects since 2016 and have been working professionally in Rust since 2021, so I tend to consider myself pretty knowledgeable about Rust. I’m already familiar with all the common limitations of Rust’s type system and how to work around them, so it’s pretty rare that I have to “fight the…
Over the weekend, I was working on a personal Rust project when I ran into an excessive memory usage problem. After an evening of trial and error, I found a workaround to fix the memory usage, but I still didn’t understand how the issue was even possible, so I then spent another evening digging through the source code…
Rust is built around the concept of “zero cost abstraction”. The idea is that you can write human-friendly high level code and the compiler will give you for free performance at least as good as any optimized low level code you could have written yourself. With zero cost abstraction, you no longer have to trade off…
One of the first things any Rust programmer learns is that you can’t pass an object and a reference to that object around at the same time. It’s impossible to do, even indirectly. This limitation has been the subject of countless questions on Stack Overflow and posts on Reddit and the Rust forums and anywhere else…