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. The new design was introduc...

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. This post is a rather belated fourth entry in my series on trait objects and objec...

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 t...

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. Branchi...

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. My travels over the last few ye...

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, ...

If you’ve been in the #rust-internals IRC channel recently, you may’ve caught a madman raving about how much they like Rust: 1 2 3 4 5 ... [15:50:03] <huon> I love this language ... [20:02:07] <huon> did you know: Rust is awesome. ... I was (and still am) losing my mind over how well Sync and Send i...

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. I had fun meeting all sorts of people interested in Rust: some who’d dived in deep already, some who’d only recently started playing with it, and some who’d b...

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 behavio...

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”. Other posts in this series on trait objects Peeking inside Trait Objects The Sized Trait Object Safety Where ...

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 type...

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. Rust as w...

Rust is an in-development0 systems programming language with a strong focus on no-overhead memory safety. This is achieved through a powerful type system (with similarities to Haskell), and careful tracking of ownership and pointers, guaranteeing safety. However, this is too restrictive for a low-le...

After posting a Rust translation of some k-nearest neighbour code, I got a few comments asking “how would you handle errors if you wanted to?”. This is the perfect chance to briefly demonstrate a few idioms. See my previous post for context and the original code; like with the code in that post, thi...

In my voyages around the internet, I came across a pair of blog posts which compare the implementation of a k-nearest neighbour (k-NN) classifier in F# and OCaml. I couldn’t resist writing the code into Rust to see how it fared. Rust is a memory-safe systems language under heavy development; this co...