In general, when working in C I avoid the standard library, libc, as much as possible. If possible I won’t even link it. For people not used to working and thinking this way, the typical response is confusion. Isn’t that like re-inventing the wheel? For me, libc is a wheel barely worth using — too many deficiencies in…
Or, how the feature that allows to write less names might make the code more explicit.
Users of mature C libraries conventionally get to choose how memory is allocated — that is, when it cannot be avoided entirely . The C standard never laid down a convention — perhaps for the better — so each library re-invents an allocator interface. Not all are created equal, and most repeat a few fundamental…
Historically, Lisp was a behemoth in the world of language design innovation. The list of Lisp’s innovations is so long that I’d have to list most of the features associated with modern languages. (Do you like if statements? You can thank Lisp!)
Some programming languages like Java or Scala offer more than one way to express a concept of “lack of value”. Traditionally, a special null value is used to...
I've been floating ways to simplify the memory management story in Rust around the core team lately. Memory management is a contentious topic, since we've worked hard to get to the current state of things, and with the push toward stability lately, there is a (quite reasonable!) resistance to any changes at this…
Let's start with an example. In Advent of Code 2022 day 1 we get groups of numbers as input like: 1000 2000 3000 4000 5000 6000 7000 8000 ...
Replacing an internal Node.js module with a native Rust module made a x25 perf boost. Let’s understand why.
Last year I finally decided to learn some Rust. The official book by Steve Klabnik and Carol Nichols is excellent, but even after reading it and working on some small code exercises, I felt that I needed more to really understand the language. I wanted to work on a small project to get some hands-on experience, but…
In this article, I describe my journey creating a barely functional rust backend enabling compilation for the .NET runtime (Usually used to run C# and F#).
I’ve been in an interviewing mindset for awhile and I’ve come to realize something important about C++ in particular. C++ is a “two peak” language. That is to say C++ is the only language I know of where two very different sets of programmers consider themselves well versed in the language. Let me show you in fake…
Scott Mabin's blog
Understand how closures really work in Rust
What can it teach us?
In this edition of the newsletter, we direct our attention to one of the most prominent highlights of the summer: the release of the Llama 2 base and chat models, as well as CodeLlama, the latest highlights in the open-source AI large language model (LLM) landscape.
I don't care about avoiding GC or about maximum performance. I treat Rust as a high level language.
I remember how pleasant it was to learn to program in C. There were so many good books explaining not only the language but also the standard library. I devoured both The C Programming Language (K&R) by Kernighan/Ritchie and The Standard C Library by P.J. Plauger. Then came Expert C Programming by Van der Linden and…
This article shows the obscure but useful capabilities of Hash, a simple but equally powerful data structure in Ruby.
...that were written in a military training camp and accidentally grew to 5k words
Building a native GUI for a cross-platform application is a decades old problem. Nowadays, most people just don't and fallback to using a non-native experience such as Electron instead.
A response to Hillel Wayne’s “I am disappointed by dynamic typing”
You're only given a little spark of madness. You mustn't lose it. Robin Williams
In Rust, if I want to print some 32-bit unsigned value in hex, with the leading 0x, padded out with zeros, I would write that as:
For more experienced functional programmers, most of this post will seem introductory, but I introduce some more advanced stuff near the end. Functional Programming over Canadian Programming Lately, I've been thinking about this Functional Programming journey I've been on. I thought it started when I was twenty, but
I sometimes get asked why I use Perl so much. Am I not a fan of strongly typed functional programming? Yeah, I am. Ask me to write something that is known, for sure , to become a big system and I’ll pick strongly typed functional programming without hesitation. 1 1 And, of course, put me in a team that uses Blub, and…
One of the primary things that people don't understand about Objective-C is that it is a solution of the two language problem , or more prec...
C++ is late to the coroutine party, compared to other programming languages, but they are part of C++20. Prior to coroutines, a C++ programmer had two choices, roughly speaking:
