I'm Huon Wilson huon_w, a post-graduate student in computational statistics. I'm a volunteer on Rust's core team.
This is my blog. See all my posts, or selected posts grouped by topic.
Recent posts
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Myths and Legends about Integer Overflow in Rust
29 Apr 2016The primitive integer types supported by CPUs are finite approximations to the infinite set of integers we’re all used to. This approximation breaks down and some computations will give results that don’t match real integers, like
Read more255_u8 + 1 == 0. Often, this mismatch is something the programmer didn’t think about, and thus can easily result in bugs. -
Memory Leaks are Memory Safe
04 Apr 2016Memory unsafety and memory leaks are arguably the two categories of bugs that have received the most attention for prevention and mitigation. As their names suggest, they are in the same part of “bug space”, however they are in some ways diametric opposites, and solving one does not solve the other. The widespread use of memory-safe managed languages hammers this point home: they avoid some memory unsafety by presenting a “leak everything” model to programmers.
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Rreverrse Debugging
27 Oct 2015Imagine being able to step forward and backwards as code runs in your debugger. Imagine being able to do an test run multiple times with exactly the same sequence of instructions and values, right down to memory addresses and IO. Imagine being able to run an executable thousands of times and then do all that in the one execution that triggers the rare bug that’s draining you of life…
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simple_parallel 0.3: Revisiting k-NN
24 Oct 2015I recently released version 0.3 of my
Read moresimple_parallelcrate, which builds on Aaron Turon’scrossbeamto resolve the stability and safety difficulties: the crate now works with Rust 1.3.0 stable, and offers safe data-parallelforloops andmaps.