Higher Rank Trait Bounds (HRTB) is relatively advanced feature in Rust, you can read short explanation in the reference, and more detailed explanation in in the RFC (frankly spoken RFC is bit more complicated, at least for me).
HRTBs are applied for lifetime parameters only (at least now) and are useful in cases where lifetime parameter in trait cannot be bound to any existing lifetime, but is valid for any particular lifetime, that happen to appear in place where type implementing the trait is used.
I’ve have been following this excellent book “Operating Systems: Three Easy Pieces” and as I’ve been doing a homework – measuring time of context switch and as I was looking around and found another interesting article related to this topic. It also compares thread switches to switches in “Go routines” – lightweight threads in Go language. Base on these sources I’m made couple of mine own test (yes I know, all benchmarks sucks, but nevertheless they are somehow attractive (as gossips are) and somehow addictive).
In past 5 years Stackoverflow was running a comprehensive survey (here is latest for 2019), which, among other questions, asked for ‘most loved programming language’ – which basically means language developers used, like it and definitely want to continue with. Rust is doing very well in this category – it leads this category for past 4 years ( and this was one of reasons, why I started to play with Rust). As this SO survey (with similar questions) is around for 5 years, it’s about time to put data in chart: Continue reading Rust, I love you, I really do→
As much as I do like Rust I have to admit there are some disadvantages of using this language – one common problem is immaturity and fragmentation of libraries – I encountered this recently when I was looking for a way how create a websocket endpoint for audioserve. audioserve is using low level HTTP library hyper – as it’s API is quite simple (which was it’s key design principle). I wanted to add websocket support on lowest possible level. Actually it turned out as not totally trivial – some frameworks like warp or actix have build in websocket support, but for pure hyper + websocket we have to start from bottom. Continue reading Hyper Websocket→
Recently I wanted to create completely static build of audioserve – so it can be easily moved and run on any modern 64bit linux without any other actions. Rust provides some guidelines for static building, but it still took me some time to make it work, mainly due to dependencies on other C/C++ libraries (libssl, libavformat …). So here I my experiences: Continue reading Static Build of Rust Executables→
I think I noticed in this article that Rust Future is basically a state machine, which is propagated through its states via appropriate runtime (and parked when not ready to move to a next state). But I did not appreciate this fact fully until recently I was making a small utility (here is new version for new futures and tokio) for creating tar archive asynchronously – it should be a Stream that produces chunks of data – first file header and then pieces of it’s content. When file is done move to next file, until all required files are sent to stream, then finally send two empty blocks, each of 512 bytes of binary zeros. I needed this Stream for my audioserve project, where I wanted to download content of whole directory as a tar archive. Stream is a kind of Future (which produces many values instead of just one), so it’s also a state machine. And when I started to think about it this way, implementation was obvious. Rust algebraic type system is of great help here as we can represent state with one complex enum type ( called TarState in this case) and it’s variants represent states of this state machine and also contain necessary internal variables for each state. So lets see state diagram for our TarStream: Continue reading Future Is A State Machine→
In previous article I presented bash script to split large audiobook file into smaller parts. It worked well for me, but has one limitation – if chapters information was not available in the metadata, then file was split into parts of exact size, which was clearly sub-optimal, as split can fall into middle of a word. So I created new script (this time in Python as logic was bit more complicated, more then I’m conformant to implement in bash), which first detects silent spots in the audiobook and splits file there. Additionally you can also supply external CSV file, which defines mapping to chapters (It’s easy to create this file, just require a bit of patience and good tool like audacity to capture the exact positions of chapter ends). I tested my tool on tens of large single file audiobooks and it seems to work fine. You can check this script in its github repo.
Sqlite3 is lightweight relational database, mainly focused on smaller local systems. Being used in Android it’s now probably most spread relational database in world with billions of instances running. Lite in the name means that it is not client-server architecture and it’s intended for lower data volumes – ideal usage profile is read mostly, with occasional writes. Sqlite3 is often used as an embedded data store in various applications (Firefox and Chrome are most prominent ones). Recently I’ve been playing a bit with sqlite3 interface in Rust and had run couple of simple tests especially focused on writes. So how does sqlite3 performs and how it compares with other more typical client-server RDBMS like PostgreSQL? It’s not any serious benchmark, just couple of toy tests to highlight few things. Continue reading Sqlite3 – How Slow Is Write?→
Recently I’ve been reading this book: “Network Programming with Rust” by Abhishek Chanda. I found this book bit problematic. It’s just collection of many unrelated examples (often taken from crates documentation), with just little of background and concepts explanation and in some parts this book is just wrong, in other parts it’s using too much simplifications, so the result does not make much sense or worst it introduces some dangerous ideas. One of these places is part about futures and streams – let’s look at one example: Continue reading Future Never Sleeps→