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Cake day: September 2nd, 2023

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  • As a rust developer I feel obligated by religion to make this comment:

    Then you’d love rust! Rust only has “interfaces” (called traits) but doesn’t have inheritance. You just have traits that don’t inherit from anything and structs (that don’t inherit from other structs) that implement X amount of traits.

    So you can have the good things about OOP without the bad ones.

    And these traits allow you to make trait objects, which would be like regular objects in C# (with vtables for the methods). If 2 different structs implement the same trait, you can “downcast” them to a trait object and store them in the same array. Or pass it is an argument to a function that wants something that implements that trait but doesn’t care about the specific struct. You can of course cast it back later to the original struct.




  • I know this thread is old. But I disagree with you.

    I agree that depending on how you use a debugger, some race conditions might not happen.

    However, I don’t agree that debuggers are useless to fix race conditions.

    I have a great example that happened to me to prove my point:

    As I was using a debugger to fix a normal bug, another quite strange unknown bug happened. That other bug was indeed a race condition. I just never encountered it.

    The issue was basically:

    1. A request to initiate a session arrives
    2. That request takes so long that the endpoint decides to shut down the session
    3. A request to end the session arrives

    And so handling the session start and session end at the same time resulted in a bug. It was more complicated than this (we do use mutexes) but it was along those lines.

    We develop in a lab-like condition with fast networking and computers, so this issue cannot happen on its own. But due to the breakpoint I put in the session initiation function, I was able to observe it. But in a real world scenario it is something that may happen.

    Not only that, I could reproduce the “incredibly rare” race condition 100% of the time. I just needed to place a breakpoint in the correct place and wait for some amount of time.

    Could this be done without a debugger? Most of the time yes, just put a sleep call in there. Would I have found this issue without a debugger? Not at all.

    An even better example:

    Deadlocks.

    How do you fix a deadlock? You run the program under a debugger and make the deadlock happen. You then look at which threads are waiting at a lock call and there’s your answer. It’s as simple as that.

    How do you print-debug a deadlock? Put a log before and after each lock in the program and look at unpaired logs? Sounds like a terrible experience. Some programs have thousands of lock calls. And some do them at tens of times per second. Additionally, the time needed to print those logs changes the behaviour of the program itself and may make the deadlock harder to reproduce.






  • 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.