A Walnut's Thoughts

Self taught developer. Interested in systems programming and game design. I love reading, especially epic fantasy. My favorites are Malazan and Wheel of Time.

TwoVec: A Very Silly Container

Lets say you want to store two different types of objects in 1 container. Simple right? Just slap those puppies in a tuple and you're good to go:

let list: Vec<(u8, f32)> = vec![(255, 20.0), (10, 37.0)];

But what if you wanted to include elements of two different types in arbitrary orders? Thankfully, there's sum types for that:

pub enum Val {
    A(u8),
    B(f32),
}

... {
    let list = vec![Val::A(255), Val::B(20.0), Val::B(37.0), Val::A(10)];
}

One small problem. That's wasteful.

Why is language documentation still so terrible?

Seriously, is there a good reason for this? I feel like I'm going crazy because almost every language doc I've looked at is legitimately awful in a bunch of obvious ways. It's not uncommon to see third party libraries updated by a single person that are better structured, more thorough, with better layouts than the official documentation upheld by the language team itself.

Bypassing the borrow checker - do ref -> ptr -> ref partial borrows cause UB?

Partial borrows across function boundaries don't really work in Rust. Unfortunately, that's kind of a major issue. There are workarounds, some are outlined here, but all of them come with pretty major drawbacks.

Simulating Starcraft Part 2 - Data Wrangling

Oh how naive I was when I thought I'd be moving on to pathfinding and abilities. I had hoped some of the game's mechanics would function better in isolation, so I could gradually add complexity on top of the tracer bullet in a modular way. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem possible without a huge refactoring burden every time I add the next layer. It'll be more worth my time to properly architect it right now, and build it from the ground up with all of the systems it'll need.

Simulating Starcraft Part 1 - Tracer Bullet

A while back, I made a small application meant to demonstrate some important principles about RTS design, namely that unit stats in a vacuum can be very misleading. As a quick example, stalkers have ~9.7 dps on paper. When fighting marines though, their effective DPS drops to ~8.4 (8.2 with combat shields) due to overkill. That's about the same DPS as a sentry. Unfortunately, there's only so much info that can be extracted from a Time To Kill calculation between two units.