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Cake day: September 2nd, 2023

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  • In my case, I don’t usually encounter cases where I can’t just ?. But when I do, just make an error enum (kinda like thiserror) that encapsulates the possible errors + possibly adds more.

    On the call site, just convert to string if I don’t care about specifics (anyhow-style).

    I don’t find this much painful.

    Concise: not much on the declaration side, since you have to create an entire enum for each function in worst-case scenario. But on code side, it’s just .map_err(MyError)?.

    Type-safe: can’t beat errors as enum values wrapped in Result.

    Composable: i don’t think you can beat rust enums in composability.

    I don’t use anyhow/thiserror, so I’m not sure. But I believe thiserror fixes the conciseness issue for this.



  • Rust allows you to choose whatever method you want.

    • Early return propagating the error
    • Early return ignoring the error (maybe by returning a default value)
    • Explicit handling by if-else (or match) to distinguish between error and not error cases.
    • Early return and turn the error into another type that is easier to handle by the caller.
    • Assume there is no error, and just panic if there is. (.unwrap)

    There are only 2 error handling methods that you cannot do:

    • Exceptions
    • Ignore the error and continue execution

    And that is because both of them are bad because they allow you to do the second one, when .unwrap is just there and better.

    If your concept of “not ugly” is “I just want to see the happy path” then you either write bad code that is “not ugly” or write good code that is “ugly”. Because there is no language that allows you to handle errors while not having error handling code near where the errors are produced.




  • You used macro_rules, which is not common at all. Most rust files don’t contain any macro definition.

    This code doesn’t even compile. There is a random function definition, and then there are loose statements not inside any code block.

    The loop is also annotated, which is not common at all, and when loops are annotated it’s a blessing for readability. Additionally, the loop (+annotation) is indented for some reason.

    And the loop doesn’t contain any codeblock. Just an opening bracket.

    Also, the function definition contains a lifetime annotation. While they are not uncommon, I wouldn’t say the average rust function contains them. Of course their frequency changes a lot depending on context, but in my experience most functions I write/read don’t have lifetime annotations at all.

    Yes, what you wrote somewhat resembles rust. But it is in no way average rust code.





  • This can also be a side product for code blocks being expressions instead of statements.

    In rust for example they are, so it’s not rare to see functions like:

    fn add_one(x: i32) -> i32 {
        x+1
    }
    

    This lets you do amazing things like:

    let x = if y < 0.0 {
        0.0
    } else {
        y
    }
    

    which is the same as x = y < 0.0 ? 0.0 : y

    But is much better for more complex logic. So you can forget about chaining 3-4 ternary operations in a single line.


  • I’ve got all that. I just needed to convert a string of characters into a list of glyph IDs.

    For context, I’m doing a code editor.

    I don’t use harfbuzz for shaping or whatever, since I planned on rendering single lines of mono spaced text. I can do everything except string->glyphs conversion.

    Just trying to implement basic features such as ligatures is incredibly hard, since there’s almost no documentation. Therefore you can’t make assumptions that are necessary to take shortcuts and make optimizations. I don’t know if harfbuzz uses a source of documentation that I haven’t been able to find, or maybe they are just way smarter than me, or if fonts are made in a way that they work with harfbuzz instead of the other way around.

    As someone trying to have as little dependencies as possible, it is a struggle. But at the same time, harfbuzz saved me soo much time.

    EDIT: I don’t do my own glyph rasterization, but that’s because I haven’t gotten to it yet, so I do use a library. I don’t know if it’s going to be harder than string->glyphs, but I doubt so.


  • I cannot comprehend what the fuck harfbuzz does.

    I tried to implement my own because “I don’t need all the features, I’m gonna render self-to-right western text with very few font features”. But holly fuck, the font format documentation is barely non-existent. And when I tried my naive solution it was like 10000x (or more) slower than harfbuzz.





  • There are use cases. Like containers where the pointer to the object itself is the key (for example a set). But they are niche and should be implemented by the standard library anyway. One of the things I hate most about Java is .equals() on strings. 99.999% of times you compare strings, you want to compare the contents, yet there is a reserved operator to do the wrong comparison.




  • In C, goto is basically a necessity though. There is really no good way of error handling.

    Options:

    1. Using goto
    void func(void *var) {
        void * var2 = malloc();
        if var == Null {
            goto err;
        }
    
        do_something();
    
    err:
        free(var2);
    }
    
    1. Early returns:
    void func(void *var) {
        void * var2 = malloc();
        if var == Null {
            free(var2);
            return;
        }
    
        do_something();
    
        free(var2);
    }
    
    1. Skipping with conditionals:
    void func(void *var) {
        bool error = false;
        void * var2 = malloc();
        if var == Null {
            error = true;
        }
    
        if !error {
            do_domething()
        }
    
        free(var2);
    }
    
    1. Early return + cleanup function.
    void cleanup(void *var2) {
        free(var2);
    }
    
    void func(void *var) {
        void * var2 = malloc();
        if var == Null {
            cleanup(var2);
            return;
        }
    
        cleanup(var2);
    }
    

    Option 1 is really the only reasonable option for large enough codebases.

    Option 2 is bad because duplicate code means you might change the cleanup in one code path but not some other. Also duplicate code takes up too much valuable screen space.

    Option 3 has a runtime cost. It has double the amount of conditionals per error point. It also adds one level of indentation per error point.

    Option 4 is same as option 2 but you edit all error paths in one single place. However, this comes at the cost of having to write 2 functions instead of 1 for every function that can error. And you can still mess up and return while forgetting to call the cleanup function.

    You must also consider that erroring functions are contagious, just like async ones. I’d say most of the time a function is propagated upwards, with very few being handled just as it ocurrs. This means that whichever downside your option has, you’ll have to deal with it in the whole call stack.