People often claim that with Rust code “when it compiles, it works”. Like most programming aphorisms, it is a slight exaggeration. This is not actually a claim that it is impossible to write bugs in Rust. It is not a claim that any program written in Rust is bug free. It is meant as a… Read More »
Efficient Linux at the Command Line Daniel J. Barrett O’Reilly, 2022 I’ve worked in Linux for over 2 decades, read dozens of articles and several books on using Linux, and this book still taught me of things I didn’t know (or remember). Unlike many N cool things you can do with Linux or X things… Read More »
Any time you have a long-term data structure, it’s important to have some form of unique identifier used to look up or recognize the structure. It doesn’t matter if the long-term data is a database record, a document in some form of storage, an object, or whatever. If the data lives for a while, you’ll… Read More »
This deserves a much bigger write-up. But, with ChatGPT taking up so much mind share lately, I have an observation. During my career, I’ve seen several technologies or approaches that would allow non-programmers to write systems, and replace those expensive programmers. The claims that I can think of right off Even Visual Basic was touted… Read More »
One approach for design trade-off is between Until recently, I tended to treat the second and third as the same. With some more thought, I’ve convinced myself they are not.
I see a lot of development advice that assumes the developer is working on a green field application. Many of the tools that “make a developer’s life easier” are also designed mostly for use in creating new applications. Most of my experience as a professional developer (or whichever title you prefer) has been improving and… Read More »
Over the years I have noticed a habit among some developers that I’ve come to call Aphorism Driven Development. Many best practices are taught and remembered through the use pithy statements. Although these statements are easy to remember, they can’t capture the full context and connotations of the practice in question. If someone never learns… Read More »
For the last several years, programmers keep choosing Rust as their favorite language. I haven’t seen a whole lot of explanation of why. After a conversation with my manager, I realized that my reasons might be quite a bit different than others. Why Learn a New Programming Language? One of my favorite computer science quotes… Read More »
Let’s say we are writing some code to retrieve data from a database. If the data we are looking for is there, we can obviously return it. If there is no data that matches our search, we need to signal that we did not find it. In many languages, we use a nil, null, or… Read More »
In the previous post, I covered a quick overview of error handling approaches in different languages. Then, I introduced Rust’s error handling using the Result<T, E> enum. This time we’ll look at how Rust’s approach improves on other techniques. Compared to Error Returns Returning a Result<T, E> from a function is very much like the… Read More »