My name is Anthony, I'm a self taught developer based in the midwest. I'm interested in systems programming, dev tools, and game design. Currently looking for work.
There is no AI generated content on this blog and there never will be.
Currently working on a Google Summer of Code project to improve the Rust debuginfo test suite. If you have any questions regarding that or the Rust debugging experience as a whole, feel free to send me an email or a message in the Rust zulip or LLVM discourse.
I love epic fantasy novels, my favorites are Malazan Book of the Fallen and The Wheel of Time. Currently reading The Black Company.
So you want better debug info?
Let me start with an emphatic "me too".
I've put many of my side projects on hold because recent events have resulted in, what I consider to be, an unacceptable degredation of the debugging experience. It's a bit hard to focus on whatever I'm doing when I have to fight to figure out what's in a Vec. One of the great things about programming is that we're the ones who make our own tools; we don't have to just blindly accept mediocrity.
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.