2015

Rreverrse Debugging
27 Oct 2015
Imagine 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 2015
I recently released version 0.3 of my simple_parallel crate, which builds on Aaron Turon’s crossbeam to resolve the stability and safety difficulties: the crate now works with Rust 1.3.0 stable, and offers safe data-parallel for loops and maps.
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SIMD in Rust
24 Aug 2015
A new scheme for SIMD in Rust is available in the latest nightly compilers, fresh off the builders (get it while it’s hot!).
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What is SIMD?
10 Jul 2015
I’m currently in San Francisco doing an internship at Mozilla Research, working on creating functionality for SIMD in the Rust programming language.
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travis-cargo 0.1.3: --no-sudo
30 Jun 2015
I just pushed travis-cargo version 0.1.3, which adds a --no-sudo command to the coveralls and coverage subcommands to allow recording/uploading test coverage without needing sudo.
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Announcing Primal: Putting Raw Power Into Prime Numbers
08 Jun 2015
Over the past few weeks I’ve been working on improving my slow_primes library, culminating in needing rename and the 0.2 release of primal, a Rust crate for computing properties of prime numbers with state-of-the-art algorithms, while still maintaining an idiomatic and easy-to-use interface.
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Defaulting to Thread-Safety: Closures and Concurrency
26 May 2015
Rust has some powerful tricks to model properties of aggregate types via unsafe traits with default and negative implementations. These features motivated by offering flexible concurrency/parallelism, and allow powerful closure-based APIs without losing any thread-safety (or memory-safety) guarantees at all.
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Rust 1.0 in Numbers
20 May 2015
Rust 1.0 was made with⁰…
1. I’ve tried to get the numbers that apply leading up to ↩
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Finding Closure in Rust
08 May 2015
Have you ever used an iterator adapter in Rust? Called a method on Option? Spawned a thread? You’ve almost certainly used a closure. The design in Rust may seem a little complicated, but it slides right into Rust’s normal ownership model so let’s reinvent it from scratch.
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Where Self Meets Sized: Revisiting Object Safety
06 May 2015
The concept of object safety in Rust was recently refined to be more flexible in an important way: the checks can be disabled for specific methods by using where clauses to restrict them to only work when Self: Sized.
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Travis on the train, part 2
01 May 2015
After announcing travis-cargo a few days ago in Helping Travis catch the rustc train, I got some great hints/contributions from Jan Segre and had a fun little time automating code coverage collection via coveralls.io. Unfortunately, this is a breaking change for existing users of travis-cargo, but the migration is easy.
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Helping Travis catch the rustc train
28 Apr 2015
I’ve been putting off configuring my continuous integration settings to match the Rust train model: it involves non-trivial branching on the configuration, and duplicating that over a pile of repos is not something I looked forward to. So, instead, I wrote travis-cargo to make things easier.
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Little libraries
27 Apr 2015
I’ve been having a lot of fun recently solving “little” problems in Rust. I have a long term project to make something for displaying my (GPS-tagged) photos nicely and, along the way, I’ve discovered and filled in a few gaps by creating focused crates for small tasks.
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Rust infrastructure can be your infrastructure
17 Mar 2015
Rust is a reasonably large project: the compiler and standard libraries are over 350kloc, built across nearly 40000 commits by the hands of around 900 contributors. Not only that: there are more than 30 other repositories in the rust-lang GitHub organisation that shouldn’t fall by the wayside, and, for rust-lang/rust alone, there are often more than 100 pull requests landing and a dozen new contributors in a single week.
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Some notes on Send and Sync
20 Feb 2015
If you’ve been in the #rust-internals IRC channel recently, you may’ve caught a madman raving about how much they like Rust:
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Rust Sydney's first meetup: trip report
14 Feb 2015
Rust Sydney had its first event last Monday! The first Rust gathering I know of in Sydney, in Australia, or in the whole southern hemisphere.
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Object Safety
13 Jan 2015
A trait object in Rust⁰ can only be constructed out of traits that satisfy certain restrictions, which are collectively called “object safety”. This object safety can appear to be a needless restriction at first, I’ll try to give a deeper understanding into why it exists and related compiler behaviour.
1. [As usual][previouspost], this post is designed to reflect ↩
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The Sized Trait
12 Jan 2015
An important piece in my story about trait objects in Rust⁰ is the Sized trait, so I’m slotting in this short post between my discussion of low-level details and the post on “object safety”.
1. Per the previous post, this post is ↩
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Peeking inside Trait Objects
10 Jan 2015
One of the most powerful parts of the Rust programming language⁰ is the trait system. They form the basis of the generic system and polymorphic functions and types. There’s an interesting use of traits, as so-called “trait objects”, that allows for dynamic polymorphism and heterogeneous uses of types, which I’m going to look at in more detail over a short series of posts.
1. It’s generally good practice for Rust posts to mention ↩
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crates.io crate graph
04 Jan 2015
Rust is a systems programming language that comes with an awesome package manager Cargo, which hooks into the crates.io registry as one of its possible sources of packages. The packages can have dependency relationships between each other, making the database into a natural directed graph.
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