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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • I’m willing to bet that it’s AI. It soft-contradicts itself quite often, emphasising that C++ is “Performance First”, but then also claiming stuff like “Rust achieves memory safety with zero runtime overhead”.

    Edit: What I am trying to say is that I have seen text like this in LLM output quite often, if the LLM is mixing text from different sources in its training data.

    Also, there is just wrong stuff in the text itself, not only in the conclusion. For instance the claim that Rust’s type system makes data races impossible. They are easier to avoid, but there is nothing stopping you from writing data races… Here, for instance, have a data race in safe Rust




  • shocking and horrifying the player is kind of the whole point of the game

    I disagree on the “shocking” part here. DDLC is psychological horror. It does have shocking moments, like the end of Act 1, but this is not the main point. It is way more about relationships than about shock moments. Sadly discussing that part of the game (the later acts…) is massive spoiler territory, so I’ll stop here.

    The fact remains though, that it is a horror game, and if the end of Act 1 is already too much, then sorry, but it is only going to get worse. A lot worse. (Or, if you enjoy psychological horror: Better. A lot better.)










  • This is so fucking stupid, I can’t even.

    For your mental health, have some reasonable arguments about Rust: https://www.heise.de/hintergrund/Entwicklung-Warum-Rust-die-Antwort-auf-miese-Software-und-Programmierfehler-ist-4879795.html

    Since it’s in German, here are the key points of the article (written from memory - the article is quite old, so I might misremember - best read the article yourself):

    • Software development is stuck in a vicious cycle regarding project budgets.
      • Some competitors don’t know better and just budget the “happy path”, that assumes that everything during development goes right.
        • The author uses a term for this which I like a lot: “Hybris of the programmer”
      • Other competitors know better, but still have to lie in order to remain competitive when it comes to prices
      • Therefore almost all software projects end up with a way too low budget
        • So we get buggy software
    • Rust might be a way out of this misery, because
      • it is understood that it takes longer to develop something with Rust
      • but on the flip-side the safety-guarantees rule out a lot of bugs
      • so customers who choose to have their project implemented using Rust are fully aware of the higher costs, but also the higher quality
      • and developers have a well known argument for the higher costs, and also have data that shows how this higher investment will yield a better quality product.



    • cargo install is for installing rust programs for your user, not for adding dependencies to your Rust project. Many cargo subcommands can be installed this way, for instance cargo bloat.
    • The file you are talking about is called Cargo.toml, because it is the file you need to write in order to configure cargo for your Rust project. TOML is the name of the file format. For details, please see the introductory chapter to Cargo in the Rust book.
    • Cargo recently got a new subcommand called cargo add, which allows to add dependencies directly on the command line. However, all it does is to add/edit/remove the respective lines in Cargo.toml. (Personal opinion: I have found it way easier to just edit the file directly than to learn yet another command…)

    That said: You still need to edit the Cargo.toml file, even if you solely use cargo add to manage your dependencies. That’s because that file contains a lot more information about your project than just the dependencies. For instance the current version, the feature-flags, your name, a link to the public repo,…


  • I haven’t done much Rust coding this year yet, mainly because I am trying to learn Lean4 and spent the last couple of months writing a (partially) formally validated (but not very fast) Binary Heap in Lean4.

    However, a few days ago I had an inspiration at night, that brought me back to my Rust spare time project: The visual novel engine I had started last year.

    For now I only did a relatively small change, but it’s one that will save me a lot of time (and nerves) later on. I am using a Free Monad based embedded Domain Specific Language for writing the game logic. The change now was to wrap that Free Monad in a State Monad Transformer, which I use to store the game state in.

    This idea seems to be working surprisingly well, and that has given me enough motivation to return to this project and to keep developing it further for now.


    Long and boring explanation with way too much detail:

    Sorry for going on a tangent, but there is a Rust-specific detail that makes this cool beyond the usual advantages of using a State Monad Transformer, and I cannot stop myself from sharing.

    For composing a large Free Monad, do-notation is more or less a must-have. However, do-notation in Rust only works well with types that implement Copy. If you want to use any other type in do-notation, you can only access variables of it in the following two lines. An attempt to access the data later will lead to an ownership problem (explained here). I have tried to overcome this by adding additional syntax to do-notation, but that is a crutch at best.

    So, this is where the State Monad Transformer comes in. It side-steps this problem by moving the state out of the do-notation block into the Free Monad’s Pure-nodes. That way it is readily available via the State Monad Transformer’s get()/put() functions, and the “use within two lines” limitation is not a big issue any more, as one can always get the value on one line, do something with it in the next line, and write the result back on the second line.